*      on-^  28 1922      * 


McConnell,    frai 
.!,ri;lacher   and   the   peopl! 


The   P" 


OTHER  BOOKS  BY  BISHOP  McCONNELL 


CHRISTIAN  FOCUS 

THE  INCREASE  OF  FAITH 

RELIGIOUS  CERTAINTY 

CHRISTMAS  SERMONS 

EDWARD  GAYER  ANDREWS 

THE  DIVINER  IMMANENCE 

THE  ESSENTIALS  OF  METHODISM 

UNDERSTANDING  THE  SCRIPTURES 

PUBLIC  OPINION  AND  THEOLOGY 


The  Preacher  and 
the  People 


FRANCIS  JOHN  McCONNEIX 

Bishop  of  the  Methodiat  Episcopal  Church 


THE  ABINGDON  PRESS 

NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1922,  by 
FRANCIS  JOHN  McCONNELL 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


TO 

MY  MOTHER 

WHO,  THEOtIGH  HEB  HUBBA>fD   AND  SONS, 

HAS  SPOKEN  IN  MORE  THAN  ONE  HUNDRED 

TEARS   OF   METHODIST    PREACHING 


CONTENTS 
1.    POPULAR  PREACHING 

PAGE 

Prefatory  Note 9 

CHA.PTEB 

I.  What  We  Mean  BY  Popular  Preaching  13 

II.  A  Word  About  Originality 23 

III.  The  Preacher's  Use  of  the  Bible  ....  33 

IV.  Helping  Men  to  Understand 43 

V.  Helping  Men  to  Think 53 

VI.  The  Guidance  of  Religious  Feeling  . .    63 
VII.  The  Quickening  of  the  Will 72 

2.    THE  PREACHER  AS  THE  VOICE 
OF  THE  PEOPLE 

VIII.  Pastoral  Work  and  Preaching 83 

IX.  The  Congregation  as  a  Force 93 

X.  The  Message  of  the  Congregation.  . .  103 

3.    THE  LARGER  HUMAN  VALUES 

XI.  A  Christian  Public  Opinion 115 

XII.  Unfolding  the  Human  Ideal 126 

XIII.  The  Expansion  of  the  Moral  Sphere.  136 

XIV.  The  Church  and  the  Social  Imagina- 

tion    146 

XV.  The  Social  Spirit  and  Personal  Piety  156 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

This  little  volume  is  the  substance  of  three 
lectures  delivered  at  De  Pauw  University, 
Greencastle,  Indiana,  in  April,  1921,  on  the 
Matthew  Simpson  Foundation  for  lectures  on 
preaching,  a  lectureship  made  possible  by  the 
generosity  of  the  daughters  of  Bishop  Simp- 
son. The  book  deals  only  with  the  min- 
ister as  preacher.  In  these  days  a  successful 
church  requires  much  more  than  preaching. 
It  demands  the  trained  services  of  educational 
directors,  of  church  visitors,  of  highly  special- 
ized staffs  of  institutional  workers.  In  all  of 
these  I  thoroughly  believe,  but  I  do  not  deal 
with  them  here.  These  lectures  are  concerned 
almost  solely  with  the  work  of  the  church  as 
that  work  is  carried  forward  by  preaching. 

My  thanks  are  due  to  Dr.  George  Richmond 
Grose,  President  of  De  Pauw  University,  for 
the  opportunity  to  deliver  the  addresses  and 
for  innumerable  kindnesses  shown  me  on  the 
occasion  of  their  delivery. 


1.    POPULAR  PREACHING 


WHAT  WE  MEAN  BY  POPULAR 
PREACHING 

A  DISTINGUISHED  professor  of  sociology  some 
time  ago  announced  as  his  opinion  that  no 
popular  preaching  can  be  honest.  We  all  know 
at  once  the  preaching  the  professor  had  in 
mind — the  type  that  expresses  itself  in  utter- 
ing what  will  please  the  people,  or  will  enter- 
tain them,  or  say  only  what  they  want  said. 
This  is  what  altogether  too  many  of  us  have 
in  mind  when  we  speak  of  popular  preaching. 

There  is  another  sense,  however,  in  which 
the  word  "popular"  can  be  used  as  applied  to 
preaching,  and  it  is  with  the  latter  sense  that 
we  shall  deal  in  these  lectures.  If  the  present- 
day  world-wide  movement  toward  increasing 
popular  influence — if  not  control — is  to  con- 
tinue through  fields  in  which  the  people  are 
interested  at  all,  we  must  take  more  and  more 
account  of  the  people  as  people ;  that  is  to  say, 
as  units  in  audiences,  congregations,  churches, 
and  denominations.  We  need  not  be  reminded 
that  people  exist  only  as  persons.  Everybody 
knows  that;  but  it  is  becoming  a  fact  of  in- 

13 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

creasingly  common  knowledge  that  persons  as- 
sembled together  as  congregations  and  think- 
ing together  as  churches  and  denominations  are 
not  quite  the  same  as  those  same  persons  acting 
as  isolated,  or  separate,  individuals.  The  late 
Dr.  Figgis  once  said  that  no  man  joins  a  church 
without  becoming  a  new  creature  just  by  the 
fact  that  he  joins  a  church,  whether  he  be- 
comes adequately  evangelized  or  Christianized 
or  not.  The  man  enters  into  a  new  set  of  re- 
lations from  those  he  knows  as  a  separate  per- 
son, and  these  relationships  are  likely  to  draw 
out  of  him  a  new  set  of  activities.  Beyond  all 
this  is  the  duty  of  the  church  to-day  in  shap- 
ing that  force  of  public  opinion  which  we  look 
to  for  changes  in  social  and  national  and  inter- 
national life,  that  public  opinion  which  is  not 
merely  the  sum  of  thoughts  of  individuals  but 
something  more  organic.  It  is  reported  that 
Phillips  Brooks  used  to  say  that  during  the 
afternoon  services  at  Trinity  Church,  at  the 
season  of  year  when  the  light  would  become  a 
little  dim  before  he  had  finished  speaking,  he 
would  lose  sight  of  the  individuals  in  the  au- 
dience and  there  would  seem  to  be  before  him 
one  composite  face — the  face  of  an  audience, 
a  congregation,  a  church.  Much  of  the  power 
of  Phillips  Brooks  lay  in  his  ability  to  speak 
t^  the  common  man  in  each  of  us.    Moreover, 

14 


POPULAR  PREACHING 

lie  spoke  not  to  the  common  man  as  the  aver- 
age, or  common  denominator  of  his  congrega- 
tion. He  appealed  to  men  raised  to  a  higher 
collective  power  as  worshipers  rather  than  to 
men  as  separate  units.  Under  Phillips  Brooks 
Trinity  Church  was  a  popular  institution  in 
a  deeper  sense  than  we  sometimes  consider. 
If  all  this  seems  to  ma,ke  of  a  group  of  people 
something  beyond  and  above  persons  compos- 
ing the  group,  may  we  say  that  we  wish  to  use 
the  word  "popular"  as  applying  to  people  "just 
as  we  find  them,"  or  the  "plain  people,"  or  the 
"man  in  the  street"? 

In  this  emphasis  on  popular  force  Abraham 
Lincoln  uttered  the  charmed  phrase,  "0/  the 
people,  'by  the  people,  for  the  people.''  The 
words  have  become  hackneyed  and  trite 
through  too  glib  repetition.  Suppose  we  take 
them,  if  we  can,  as  if  we  were  hearing  them 
for  the  first  time,  and  ask  ourselves  in  what 
manner  the  pulpit  of  the  church  can  be 
of  the  people,  and  by  the  people,  and  for 
the  people;  that  is  to  say,  in  what  sense 
does  the  pulpit  belong  to  the  people?  At 
what  must  preaching  aim?  How  can  preach- 
ing put  people  in  possession  of  the  truth 
to  which  they  have  claim?  Do  the  people 
of  a  church  or  a  congregation  speak  through 
preaching?    In  what  terms  must  the  preacher 

15 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

speak  if  he  is  to  minister  to  the  masses  of  man- 
kind? These  general  questions  will  be  in  our 
minds  during  this  brief  series  of  addresses. 

We  may  as  well  confront  at  the  outset  the 
critic  who  tells  us  that  if  preaching  is  to  deal 
■with  people,  we  do  not  need  a  professional 
group  of  ministers.  People,  we  are  told,  are 
not  interested  in  theology,  or  scientific  bibli- 
cal study,  or  elaborately  refined  organizations 
or  rituals.  People  want  life.  A  socialistic 
critic  of  all  existing  social  institutions  once  re- 
marked that  in  the  reorganized  social  state 
there  will  be  no  class  of  professional  priests 
or  preachers.  Such  persons  as  may  be  inter- 
ested in  religious  matters  will  informally  meet 
together  and  call  upon  some  one  of  their  num- 
ber to  talk  to  them,  or  they  will  one  after  an- 
other rise  and  speak  what  may  happen  to  occur 
to  them.  This,  according  to  the  critic,  is  the 
only  religious  service  that  can  be  popular  in 
the  fundamental  sense — and  this  service  va- 
cates the  office  of  trained  minister  at  once. 

Such  criticism  as  this — be  it  noticed — is  a 
survival  from  a  conception  of  social  organiza- 
tion fast  passing  out  of  date.  A  few  years  ago 
popular  development  was  supposed  to  be  sure 
to  take  on  the  form  of  one  mass  movement 
reaching  into  everything.  The  people  as  a 
whole  would  pass  judgment  on   everything, 

16 


POPULAR  preachi:ng 

and  would  thus  directly  make  their  control 
effective.  The  emphasis  to-day,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  on  the  people  as  working  through 
many  and  diverse  groups,  the  groups  them- 
selves being  measurably  self-determining  and 
making  up  in  the  final  total  an  organism  rather 
than  a  mass.  So  that  if  some  fancied  social 
Utopia  were  sprung  upon  us  over  night,  the 
next  Sunday  would  probably  see  the  re- 
ligiously minded  getting  together  to  hold  a 
meeting,  and  after  the  meeting  appointing  a 
committee  to  provide  for  further  meetings. 
Thus  we  would  see  them  on  the  highroad  to  a 
permanent  organization  and  the  establishment 
of  a  ministry  of  men  set  apart  to  serve  the  or- 
ganization. 

The  above  criticism  too  forgets  that  we  at 
present  have  the  religious  service  that  our 
socialistic  friend  suggests,  and  that  it  does  not 
altogether  meet  the  need.  Almost  every  church 
holds  meetings  in  which  a  leader  may  call  upon 
anyone  present  for  discussion  of  religious 
problems,  or  in  which  anyone  can  rise  and 
speak  as  he  pleases.  Prayer  meetings  are  such 
services,  and  it  is  a  desperate  problem  in  many 
quarters  to  keep  them  alive.  Prayer  meetings, 
or  meetings  in  which  anyone  can  feel  free  to 
take  part,  are  indeed  of  value,  but  their  value 
is  mostly  to  those  who  take  part.    One  reason 

17 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

why  it  is  so  difficult  to  get  support  for  a  prayer 
meeting  is  that  hearers  want  discussions 
founded  on  thoughtful  and  skilled  prepara- 
tion— and  the  ordinary  midweek  service  is  not 
given  to  just  such  discussion.  The  prayer 
meeting  that  does  best  is  the  one  in  which  the 
program  is  most  thoroughly  thought  out,  in 
which  the  extemporaneous  element  is  kept  to 
a  wholesome  minimum. 

It  is  recognized  to-day  that  popular  insti- 
tutions must  stand  or  fall  largely  with  their 
reliance  upon  experts.  Division  of  labor  rules 
in  the  sphere  of  religious  effort  as  well  as  else- 
where, and  division  of  labor  makes  experts. 
We  can  hardly  defend  provision  for  the  expert 
in  religious  service  which  sets  apart  specialists 
to  do  all  the  praying  for  the  people,  or  to  hold 
chief  means  of  access  to  salvation,  or  to  monop- 
olize in  themselves  the  virtues  of  godliness. 
That  would  be  priestcraft  indeed.  We  are 
speaking  now  of  the  presentation  of  truth  in 
preaching,  and  the  presentation  of  truth  im- 
plies much  that  can  be  achieved  only  by  the 
trained  and  practiced  mind. 

By  the  way,  it  is  a  strange  notion  that  the 
people  distrust  experts.  On  the  contrary,  one 
of  the  shortest  and  quickest  paths  to  popu- 
larity has  always  been  through  expertness. 
Historians  sometimes  say  that  the  American 

18 


POPULAR  PREACHING 

emphasis  on  equality  came  out  of  the  early 
frontier  days  when  every  man  was  approxi- 
mately the  equal  of  every  other  man.  In  the 
terrible  struggle  with  forest  and  swamp  and 
beast  and  savage  only  two  tools  were  at  hand — 
the  ax  and  the  rifle.  All  men  were  alike  equal 
before  a  daily  possibility  of  a  tragic  fate. 
There  was  equality  too  in  that  men  resented 
any  assumption  of  overlordship  by  their  fel- 
lows. Every  man  thought  he  was  about  as 
well  fitted  to  rule  as  any  other,  and  there  was 
a  feeling  among  the  hardy  frontiersmen  of 
good-humored  adequacy  to  or  superiority  to  of- 
ficial tasks.  So  that  when  Andrew  Jackson, 
the  exemplar  of  that  popular  sovereignty 
which  preached  the  equality  of  every  man  to 
every  other,  raised  the  cry  of  claiming  the 
spoils  of  office  as  the  right  of  the  victor  he 
voiced  the  feeling  of  the  frontiersmen  about 
offices.  Offices  were  good  things  to  be  enjoyed. 
If  they  were  serious  responsibilities,  one  man 
could  discharge  them  as  well  as  another.  We 
would  woefully  misread  that  pioneer  notion  of 
popular  equality  if  we  said,  however,  that  it 
had  no  place  for  the  expert.  In  the  handling 
of  the  ax  and  the  rifle  there  w^ere  experts  whose 
prodigies  of  skill  were  repeated  in  the  frontier 
story  as  long  as  the  frontier  itself  lasted. 
Anybody  might  be  expert  enough  to  fill  an  of- 

19 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

fice.  Not  everybody  was  as  expert  in  reading 
forest  signs,  or  in  tracking  wild  beasts  or  In- 
dians, or  in  extricating  liimself  from  appar- 
ently hopeless  plights  as  was  Daniel  Boone  or 
Andrew  Jackson.  Nowhere  has  the  expert 
received  more  honor  than  in  those  early  pioneer 
days  out  of  which  the  contempt  of  the  expert 
in  American  life  is  supposed  to  have  arisen. 
Moreover,  there  were  experts  in  public 
speech  in  those  same  days.  The  pioneer 
preachers  became  masters  of  an  oratory  all 
their  own  and  attained  that  mastery  by  de- 
voting their  whole  time  and  strength  to  preach- 
ing. If  we  were  to  pick  out  an  expertism  as 
distinctive  as  any,  we  could  find  it  in  the 
preaching  of  the  circuit-riders  in  the  day  when, 
we  are  told,  the  characteristic  doctrine  of  the 
frontier  was  that  any  man  was  as  good  as  any 
other.  No :  we  are  not  to  turn  our  backs  on 
an  expert  ministry  in  urging  a  more  and  more 
deeply  popular  preaching.  Just  an  instant's 
reflection  shows  us  that  one  road  to  genuine 
desert  of  public  favor  is  through  the  develop- 
ment of  expert  skill.  So  long  as  his  fellow  man 
does  not  attempt  to  lord  it  over  him  by  airs 
of  superiority,  the  ordinary  man,  the  plain  man 
whom  we  think  of  as  the  source  of  popular 
movements,  is  likely  to  give  that  fellow  man 
unstinted  admiration  for  skill  in  any  direc- 

20 


POPULAK  PREACHING 

tion,  including  public  speech.  One  element  in 
the  power  of  many  an  orator  is  his  command 
over  the  admiration  of  the  man  who  cannot 
himself  speak  effectively  to  a  group,  for  the 
man  w^ho  can  thus  speak. 

There  is  point  in  the  criticism  of  the  trained 
minister,  but  the  point  holds  generally  only 
against  those  who  become  technical  and  over- 
specialized.  The  overspecialized  expert  is  the 
one  who  loses  sight  of  his  ends  in  the  use  of 
his  means,  who  keeps  his  instruments  so  con- 
stantly in  the  foreground  that  he  seems  to  for- 
get what  the  instruments  are  for.  When  men 
say  of  such  preachers  that  they  are  "dry"  the 
criticism  means  that  the  preachers  have  some- 
how lost  life.  What  groups  of  Christians  as- 
sembled to  hear  preaching  most  desire  is  that 
the  preacher  shall  refresh  them  into  life.  The 
ordinary  experiences  of  daily  life  are  likely  to 
result  in  the  evaporation  of  faith.  Faith  dis- 
appears as  did  the  oil  in  the  lamps  of  the  vir- 
gins— it  burns  out.  If  a  preacher  can  address 
one  hundred,  or  ten  hundred,  hearers  every 
Sunday  and  send  them  away  from  his  preach- 
ing "feeling  better,"  "braced  up,"  "refreshed," 
"quickened"  in  the  higher  ranges  of  their  liv- 
ing, he  has  performed  well  his  main  task.  This 
is  why  there  is  sometimes  so  large  a  demand  for 
young  men  in  the  pulpit — ^just  because  they 

21 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

are  young.  They  are  full  of  life.  People  catch 
the  life  and  are  invigorated  thereby.  The  sad 
feature  is  that  the  life  of  the  preacher  who  is 
lively  merely  because  he  is  young,  whose  life 
is  the  springing  buoyancy  of  youth  itself,  so 
often  ceases  to  be  lively  when  he  grows  older. 
It  might  almost  be  said  that  the  problem  of 
training  the  preacher  for  popular  effectiveness 
is  that  of  keeping  him  young,  or  of  increasing 
his  youth  as  the  years  go  by.  For  such  spirit- 
ual youth  is  possible.  When  we  speak  of  the 
preacher  as  an  expert  we  refer  chiefly  to  ex- 
pertness  in  getting  hold  of  inner  springs  of  life. 
The  preacher  must  be  toward  himself  a  wise 
physician  or  a  wise  trainer.  He  must  avoid 
all  that  cuts  into  the  fountains  of  life.  For 
the  people  demand  life,  and  the  essential  in 
serving  people  is  to  bring  them  life,  if  w^e  are 
to  be  followers  of  Him  who  came  that  men 
might  have  life  and  might  have  it  abundantly. 
This  does  not  mean  that  the  lively  young 
preacher  who  puts  in  his  time  scampering 
through  the  fields  with  "our  young  people"  is 
necessarily  the  worthiest  fountain  of  religious 
life,  for  there  are  higher  forms  of  life  than 
this. 


22 


II 

A  WORD  ABOUT  ORIGINALITY 

It  is  the  task  of  the  preacher  to  put  people 
in  possession  of  what  they  should  have  by 
right,  to  give  them  what  is  their  own,  in  other 
words.  The  life  which  is  in  Christ  is  theirs. 
The  preacher  must  see  that  they  get  that  life 
in  so  far  as  the  life  can  be  communicated  in 
preaching.  We  limit  ourselves  to  preaching, 
but  that  does  not  mean  that  we  forget  that, 
after  all,  it  is  the  preacher's  total  personal 
force  which  counts.  We  will  try  not  to  forget 
that  it  is  the  man  back  of  the  preaching  who 
makes  the  preaching  go.  When  I  was  a  young 
minister  I  prepared  a  sermon  with  all  the  care 
possible  to  me  at  the  time.  As  I  now  recall, 
I  wrote  the  sermon  in  full,  and  then  most  care- 
fully revised  and  rewrote.  My  people  were 
only  mildly  interested.  A  little  later  an  older 
preacher  came  into  the  neighborhood  who 
preached  in  my  pulpit  on  a  theme  somewhat 
similar  to  mine.  I  had  to  admit  to  myself  that, 
judged  by  any  standard  of  effectiveness,  the 
older  man's  sermon  held  the  attention  of  the 
people  more  closely  than  had  mine.  I  had  to  ad- 

23 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

mit  also  that  as  far  as  formal  preparation  went 
the  older  man's  sermon  was  not  as  well 
wrought  out  as  mine — and  the  whole  outcome 
was  a  puzzle  to  me.  With  the  advancing  years, 
however,  I  have  seen  that  the  difference  lay  in 
that  there  was  more  back  of  the  older  man's 
utterance  than  back  of  mine.  There  were  fifty 
years  more  of  Christian  experience,  for  one 
thing.  I  may  have  had  the  more  accurately 
shaped  homiletic  bullet,  but  the  older  preacher 
had  the  greater  driving  power.  If  I  had  been 
wisely  advised,  I  would  have  been  told  that  it 
was  not  my  fault  that  I  was  not  fifty  years 
older  than  I  was.  All  of  which  is  to  be  kept 
In  mind.  We  cannot  make  people  older  than 
they  are,  or  other  persons  than  they  are.  We 
know  that  the  bigger  the  man  the  bigger  the 
preaching:  but  we  are  now  taking  preachers 
just  as  we  find  them  and  are  asking  how  they 
can  make  the  most  of  their  capabilities  and  op- 
portunities for  the  preaching  of  the  truth. 

We  may  think  for  the  moment  about  origi- 
nality as  the  secret  of  much  power  of  religious 
leadership.  What  is  originality?  Surely  not 
the  ability  to  say  things  remarkable  for  smart- 
ness— or  queerness — or  even  to  say  things 
which  no  one  has  ever  thought  of  before.  Some- 
times the  greatest  originality  shows  itself  in 
expressing  what  almost  everybody  has  at  least 

24 


A  WORD  ABOUT  ORIGINALITY 

half  thought  of  before.  Originality  starts  from 
so  working  ideas  into  ourselves  that  when  they 
come  forth  from  us  they  move  again  as  from 
a  new  origin.  All  depends,  at  the  outset,  on 
how  much  in  the  world  of  spiritual  force  we 
can  seize  and  make  our  own.  The  energy  of 
a  stream  depends  on  the  extent  to  which  it 
takes  advantage  even  of  the  shape  of  a  con- 
tinent to  merge  rainfalls  into  its  own  current. 
Or,  to  speak  in  terms  of  life,  the  physical  force 
of  a  man  depends  not  upon  any  absolute  origi- 
nation of  powers  in  himself  but  upon  the  de- 
gree to  which  his  organism  can  transform  into 
energy  the  food  which  he  consumes.  The 
preacher  must  make  spiritual  energies  his  own 
by  a  similarly  intensely  vital  seizure. 

It  was  said  of  a  leader  in  a  realm  which 
called  for  superior  technical  knowledge  that 
he  had  the  power  to  "digest  his  knowledge  out 
of  sight"  so  that  all  trace  of  his  knowledge  as 
scientific  information  was  lost  in  the  final  de- 
cision, with  no  suggestion  of  scientific  termi- 
nology or  of  complicated  process.  Only  the 
young  or  half-trained  physician  talks  in  the 
language  of  the  professional  school.  The 
knowledge  of  the  older  expert  has  been  di- 
gested— it  has  passed  into  him,  it  is  part  of 
himself.  This  is  the  difference  between  gen- 
uine   utterance    and    superficial    utterance. 

25 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

Borden  P.  Bowne  once  said  that  if  a  thinker 
will  make  a  thought  his  own,  utterances  "on 
the  outside"  will  grow  into  utterances 
"from  the  inside."  When  the  people  rejoiced  at 
hearing  Jesus  it  was  because  he  spoke  with  au- 
thority, not  as  the  scribes.  Jesus  said  things 
from  within.  The  scribes  talked  about  things 
on  the  outside. 

The  essential  of  Christianity  is  the  doctrine 
of  the  Christlike  God.  If  we  can  believe  that 
God  is  like  Christ,  everything  else  worth  while 
follows,  not  by  the  implications  of  strict 
formal  logic  but  by  the  spiritual  necessities  of 
such  a  God.  If  God  is  like  Christ,  we  have 
forthwith  the  right  to  believe  in  the  dignity  of 
man,  man's  immortality,  the  possibility  of  de- 
liverance from  evil  and  growth  into  unending 
power.  This  central  truth,  however,  cannot  be 
adequately  preached  merely  by  being  an- 
nounced to  men.  The  gospel  is  indeed  the 
good  news  of  God,  but  preaching  is  not  over 
with  the  bare  pronouncement  of  the  news.  I 
once  knew  a  devoted  itinerant  who  went  into 
every  city  and  town  of  a  Central  America 
state  simply  announcing  the  gospel.  He 
fancied  that  by  so  doing  he  was  obeying  the 
command  whose  fulfillment  would  bring  the 
return  of  Christ  in  the  flesh.  He  spoke  of  hav- 
ing "evangelized"  Costa  Rica,  in  particular. 

26 


A  WORD  ABOUT  ORIGINALITY 

Evangelization  means  the  preaching  of  the 
good  news  and  not  the  bare  publishing  of  the 
news.  We  cannot  tell  how  new  the  good  news 
about  God  is,  or  how  good  it  is,  without  preach- 
ing. The  headlines  of  a  newspaper  may  carry 
the  news  of  a  scientific  discovery,  or  of  a  legis- 
lative enactment,  or  of  a  social  revolution. 
The  meaning  of  that  announcement  may  ex- 
haust the  interpretative  powers  of  scores  and 
thousands  of  students.  It  may  require  a  thou- 
sand books  to  tell  what  the  newspaper  an- 
nounces in  ten  words,  for  the  implications  of 
good  news  have  to  be  wrought  out  into  clear 
understanding  and  forceful  speech  and  effec- 
tive action. 

The  preacher  has,  or  is  supposed  to  have, 
the  good  news  of  God;  but  other  people  may 
not  have  that  news.  The  phrases  about  the 
Christlike  God  may  mean  nothing  until  they 
are  carried  out  into  their  implications.  Then 
they  begin  to  show  what  a  difference  they 
would  make  for  human  life  if  they  were  actu- 
ally believed.  The  working  of  an  idea  out  into 
its  implications  is  done,  we  repeat,  as  the 
preacher  thoroughly  makes  the  idea  his  own. 
A  long  step  toward  popular  success  in  re- 
ligious ministry  is  taken  w^hen  the  occupant 
of  the  pulpit  shows  that  he  has  heard  the  good 
news  himself.     I  once  stood  by  a  man  in  a 

27 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

foreign  land  who  was  announcing  to  a  com- 
pany the  names  of  a  visiting  party  from  Amer- 
ica. The  official  was  announcing  correctly  and 
politely  enough,  but  with  remoteness  of  inter- 
est which  sometimes  goes  with  correctness  and 
politeness.  At  the  utterance  of  a  particular 
name  the  visitor  announced  said,  "Doesn't  that 
name  call  up  something  in  your  memory?" 
Then  the  mere  announcer  became  a  friend,  re- 
membering his  friend's  name  and  clasping  the 
hand  of  a  companion  whom  he  had  not  seen 
for  twenty  years.  The  light  of  welcome  in  the 
transformed  face  was  far  beyond  formal  po- 
liteness. The  face  of  the  preacher  sometimes 
likewise  lights  up  when  his  word  about  God 
shows  that  he  has  himself  heard  the  good  news 
and  that  the  news  is  in  a  peculiarly  intimate 
and  personal  sense  Ms  news.  We  say  again 
that  the  more  personal  a  man  can  make  his  be- 
lief in  God  the  wider  social  hearing  he  can  get 
for  his  message.  The  more  that  message  is  his 
own  the  more  he  can  give  it  to  others.  The 
more  he  gives  it  to  others  the  more  he  makes 
it  his  own. 

May  we  here  enter  a  plea  for  the  habit  of 
brooding  meditation  by  the  preacher?  We 
shall  have  so  much  to  say  about  the  need  of 
formal  effort  in  study  that  to  some  this  little 
book  may  seem  to  repeat  the  speech  of  the  bar- 

28 


A  WORD  ABOUT  ORIGINALITY 

ren  homiletic  manual.  All  the  more  reason, 
then,  why  we  should  make  clear  that  around 
and  through  and  over  all  the  specific  and  me- 
thodical and  systematized  study  should  go  that 
deep  brooding  which  ripens  knowledge  into 
wisdom — the  hours  upon  hours  spent  in  hold- 
ing the  central  themes  before  the  mind,  with 
the  mind  as  it  were  waiting  to  see  what  will 
come  from  them,  in  asking  and  reasking  the 
same  questions,  in  letting  the  imagination,  or 
even  the  fancy,  carry  out  the  implications  of 
the  theme  into  all  directions,  in  unhurried 
movement  toward  a  conclusion  or  away  from 
a  conclusion. 

It  is  well  for  those  of  us  who  are  trying  to 
preach  the  gospel  to  remind  ourselves  that  a 
sermon  is  a  growth  rather  than  a  product  of 
mechanical  labor.  In  all  that  we  say,  then, 
about  the  mechanics  of  sermon-making  we 
trust  that  we  shall  be  understood  to  mean 
that  we  are  dealing  with  the  gospel  as  a  living 
seed,  with  the  minds  of  ourselves  and  of  others 
as  soil.  The  mechanical  devices  we  conceive  of 
as  hoes  or  plows  or  harrows  or  pruning  knives 
rather  than  as  the  tools  of  a  factory.  We  are 
cultivating  fields  and  gardens  rather  than 
building  machines.  For  all  this  we  have  the 
sanction  of  the  Master's  own  example.  He  was 
the  sower  of  seed  and  the  reaper  of  harvests. 

29 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

If  this  means  anything,  it  means  that  the 
development  of  the  power  to  brood  gives  our 
minds  a  chance  to  treat  the  truth  according  to 
their  own  laws  and  peculiarities,  to  put  upon 
the  truth  the  peculiar  tang  which  makes  it 
our  own.  These  minds  of  ours — ours,  indeed, 
by  all  the  distinctiveness  of  separate  personal 
individuality — are  not  entirely  under  the  di- 
rect control  of  our  own  wills.  We  are  mys- 
teries even  to  ourselves.  Thoughts  and  feel- 
ings which  bear  all  the  marks  of  our  own  selves 
at  times  seem  to  have  arisen  outside  of  our- 
selves. Now,  such  ideas  and  impulses,  flavored 
as  they  are  with  the  feeling  that  they  have  come 
from  a  source  above  ourselves,  are  likely  to  be 
those  that  must  carry  with  them,  both  to  our- 
selves and  to  others,  the  tingle  of  living  proph- 
ecy. The  fact  probably  is  that  these  ideas  are 
the  truest  growths  of  our  minds,  made  possi- 
ble as  we  allow  the  minds  to  have  their  way 
with  themselves  and  with  the  truth. 

Heaven  forbid  that  this  may  be  taken  as  an 
advocacy  of  daydreaming  or  of  letting  minds 
merely  drift  along  by  the  law  of  association. 
I  once  knew  a  preacher  who  said  that  he  sim- 
ply lay  flat  on  his  back  and  dreamed  out  his 
sermons.  From  the  lulling,  soothing  effect  of 
his  sermons  I  am  inclined  to  think  this  was 
true.    There  was  certainly  nothing  in  them  to 

30 


A  WORD  ABOUT  ORIGINALITY 

arouse  anybody's  attention.  What  I  am  plead- 
ing for  is  something  beyond  that  systematic, 
scheduled  thinking  which  must  arrive  at  a  par- 
ticular point  according  to  time-table,  some- 
thing, on  the  contrary,  which  turns  around  an 
idea  and  gazes  upon  it  from  every  angle,  and 
which  refuses  to  be  hurried.  Some  mighty 
theme — and  what  is  mightier  than  the  doctrine 
of  the  Christlike  God? — should  be  in  the 
preacher's  mind  as  a  vine  which  yields  fruit 
as  the  mind  works  like  a  husbandman  upon  the 
vine.  Implications  of  central  and  fundamental 
conceptions  should  be  allowed  to  ripen;  but 
ripening  is  not  a  forced  mechanical  process. 
It  is  intense — this  ripening  process — but  it  is 
altogether  natural.  Ideas  should  mature  thus 
naturally.  Or,  to  employ  another  figure,  we 
may  refer  to  the  wonderful  suggestiveness  of 
the  passage  in  opening  Genesis  which  tells  us 
that  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  brooded  upon  the 
face  of  the  deep  as  a  bird  over  her  nest.  That 
first  chapter  of  Genesis  might  well  be  studied 
by  the  preacher  as  a  hint  about  the  creative 
mood.  The  purpose  of  the  scriptural  writer 
is  to  show  the  divine  orderliness  of  creation, 
and  the  orderliness  as  coming  out  of  the  divine 
brooding. 

The  modern  psychologist  rightly  lays  stress 
on  the  activity  of  the  subconscious  self.    What 

31 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

arises  out  of  these  subconscious  depths  which 
seem  to  stir  of  themselves  will  largely  depend 
on  what  we  send  down  into  them  from  open- 
eyed  thinking.  I  once  worked  for  hours  over 
a  mathematical  proposition  and  finally  gave  it 
up  in  despair.  The  next  day,  as  I  was  walking 
down  the  street,  the  solution  suddenly  flashed 
upon  me.  I  said  to  myself,  boy  as  I  was,  that 
if  such  were  the  way  algebra  solutions  were 
to  come,  I  would  thereafter  just  let  them  come 
without  any  further  struggle.  For  the  next 
lesson  the  solution  did  not  come.  So  I  learned 
that  purposeful  thought  is  indispensable,  but 
that  to  season  or  ripen  that  purposeful  thought 
it  is  best  to  let  the  juices  of  the  subconscious 
soak  into  it.  To  do  this  the  preacher  must 
fight  against  all  the  distracting  influences  in 
his  parish  that  make  against  the  brooding  life, 
that  those  powers  which  we  call  collectively  by 
the  name  of  "time"  may  get  a  chance  at  his 
thinking.  The  skill  which  the  expert  in  any 
activity  has  comes  from  just  such  slow  ripen- 
ing. 


32 


Ill 

THE  PKEACHER'S  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE 

It  is  not  my  purpose  to  try  to  suggest  to 
preachers  detailed  schemes  of  study.  We  shall 
all  admit,  however,  that  the  one  book  which  it 
is  essential  for  the  preacher  to  know  is  the 
Bible.  The  preacher  must  read  the  Bible  in- 
cessantly. He  must  read  it  with  a  double  aim, 
so  far  as  his  work  as  a  preacher  is  concerned, 
namely,  to  find  what  a  passage  meant  for  the 
man  who  wrote  it,  and,  secondly,  what  the 
passage  has  of  significance  for  men  and  women 
and  children  to-day. 

Underneath  everything  in  the  use  of  the 
Scriptures  is  the  resolution  to  learn  what  the 
scripture  meant  to  the  original  writer.  A 
preacher  may  make  any  homiletic  use  of  a  text 
he  pleases,  within  the  limits  of  good  sense,  if 
he  first  learns  and  declares  the  original  mean- 
ing of  the  text.  Everything  must  start  from 
that  open  and  honest  declaration  of  what  the 
passage  first  meant.  After  that  it  is  legitimate 
for  the  preacher  to  say  that  the  text  suggests 
something  quite  different  to  himself,  or  that 
the   biblical   figure   of   speech  warrants   our 

83 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

carrying  out  the  figure  to  implications  which 
the  writer  may  not  have  had  in  mind,  or  that 
the  reflection  of  the  centuries  has  loaded  the 
passage  with  a  significance  of  which  the  au- 
thor did  not  dream. 

In  learning  what  the  scriptural  passage 
meant  to  him  who  first  wrote  it  the  preacher  is 
entitled  to  look  for  light  in  any  quarter.  It 
will  be  his  duty  especially  to  see  what  the  mod- 
ern methods  of  scientific  biblical  study  have 
to  teach.  This  does  not  mean  that  he  must 
accept  what  the  present-day  scientific  student 
declares  to  be  the  meaning  of  a.  particular 
scripture,  but  he  ought  to  know  what  the  scien- 
tific verdict  is.  There  cannot  be  anything 
more  foolish  than  to  ignore  the  teachings  of 
those  who  bring  the  scientific  method  to  bear 
on  the  search  for  scriptural  meanings.  The 
scientific  method,  in  general,  has,  within  the 
past  half-century,  all  but  made  over  the  world 
in  which  we  live.  It  has,  indeed,  led  to  much 
skepticism  and  even  materialism,  but  these 
have  been  more  than  offset  by  the  positive  good 
obtained.  Now,  the  scientific  method  has 
wrought  as  decisive  victories  in  the  field  of 
biblical  research  as  anywhere  else.  Before 
long  there  will  be  general  recognition  of  the 
debt  of  religion  to  that  method.  Science  asks 
insistently  as  to  what  the  passage  meant  to  the 

34 


THE   PREACHER'S   USE   OF   THE   BIBLE 

man  who  wrote  it.  Even  if  the  author  wrote 
miraculously  that  question  remains.  To  an- 
swer the  question  scholars  have  labored  over 
old  manuscripts,  excavated  ancient  cities,  de- 
ciphered inscriptions  by  the  thousand — in 
short,  labored  with  overwhelming  industry. 
The  majority  of  men  who  have  worked  thus 
have  had  no  other  thought  than  to  find  the 
meaning  of  the  scriptural  revelation.  The 
important  results  have  been  made  so  accessible 
that  the  humblest  preacher  cannot  honestly 
claim  that  they  are  beyond  his  reach.  How  a 
man  can  think  of  himself  as  an  expert  worker 
in  the  Lord's  field  if  he  pays  no  attention  to  the 
instruments  thus  spread  out  before  him  is  one 
of  the  major  mysteries.  It  is  possible  for  a 
man  to  cut  a  harvest  of  grain  with  the  old 
hand-sickle,  but  there  are  better  instruments 
made  possible  by  the  progress  of  science.  In 
the  end  the  people  will  lose  confidence  in  him 
who  does  not  seem  to  be  using  the  best  tools. 
The  popular  demand  for  up-to-dateness  may  be 
the  itch  for  novelty.  It  is  so,  for  example,  in 
the  demand  for  novelties  of  dress  or  adorn- 
ment. It  is  not  so  in  the  demand  for  medical  or 
surgical  remedies  or  for  more  wholesome  food 
or  clothing.  In  such  realms  the  "last  word," 
the  "latest  thing,"  may  be  the  word  or  the  thing 
that  saves  a  life. 

35 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

We  still  hear  occasionally,  though  not  as 
often  as  formerly,  that  to  introduce  the  scien- 
tific method  into  biblical  study  leads  at  once 
to  a  discriminatory  judgment  which  puts  dif- 
ferent parts  of  the  Scriptures  on  different 
levels,  and  thus  introduces  standards  of  value 
which  may  end  in  leaving  us  all  at  sea,  to  say 
nothing  of  doing  away  outright  with  the  doc- 
trine that  all  scripture  is  inspired.  To  which 
we  must  reply  that  Bible  readers  in  all  ages 
have  done  the  same  thing — they  have  made 
more  of  some  Scripture  passages  than  of 
others,  no  matter  how  firmly  they  may  have 
insisted  that  all  scriptural  writing  is  alike 
inspired.  Any  Bible  of  a  saintly  mother  or 
a  devout  Christian  worker  tells  the  story  by 
revealing  the  parts  that  are  well  thumbed. 
Every  devoted  Bible  reader  makes  his  own 
Bible  by  selection,  at  least.  It  is  folly  to  main- 
tain that  Bible  readers  put  John's  Gospel  on 
a  level  with  Ecclesiastes,  or  Job  with  Chroni- 
cles, or  Paul's  Epistles  with  Esther  or  Prov- 
erbs. The  saints  have  always  been  radical  with 
the  Bible  in  that  they  have  kept  closest  to  the 
"root  of  the  matter." 

Now,  modern  biblical  method  has  added  to 
the  range  of  the  significant  portions  of  Scrip- 
ture. It  has  shown  us  the  meaning — or  at 
least  a  meaning — in  passages  that  we  once 

36 


THE   PREACHEK'S   USE  OF   THE   BIBLE 

passed  by  as  mysteries.  The  difference  is  that 
we  do  not  now  need  to  pass  them  by.  In  the 
light  of  the  fuller  knowledge  we  understand 
the  part  that  even  imperfect  conceptions 
played  in  leading  on  and  up  to  the  fuller  reve- 
lation which  came  with  Jesus.  The  newer 
methods  of  study  have  thus  brought  unused, 
or  slightly  used,  passages  of  Scripture  out  to 
fuller  usefulness  and  have  even  added  to  the 
usableness  of  the  greatest  passages. 

The  students  going  out  from  theological 
school  have  too  often  been  of  one  of  two  classes :: 
either  they  have  lugged  all  their  scientific  ap- 
paratus into  the  pulpit  with  them,  or  they  have 
seemed  to  think  that  the  scientific  method  is 
something  to  be  looked  at  and  then  put  to  one 
side.  It  is  hard  to  tell  which  type  does  the 
more  harm.  The  first  type  of  student  ought 
to  reflect  that  the  popular  demand  for  any- 
thing is  more  for  results  which  speak  for  them- 
selves than  for  descriptions  of  the  processes 
which  bring  the  results.  Will  the  reader  please 
remember  throughout  these  discussions  that 
we  are  talking  of  preaching  and  not  of  Bible- 
class  instruction?  There  is  ample  place  in 
the  church  program  for  consideration  of  pres- 
ent-day biblical  methods,  but  that  place  is  in 
the  class  where  questions  can  be  asked  and 
answered.     A  large  part  of  the  wretched  re- 

37 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

action  of  to-day  toward  antiquated  biblical  in- 
terpretation is  due  to  the  failure  of  churches 
to  put  before  the  layman  Bible-class  oppor- 
tunities to  become  acquainted  with  the  better 
methods.  For  the  preacher,  however,  to  lug 
into  the  sermon  debatable  points  in  biblical 
opinion,  or  to  talk  about  processes  at  all  except 
on  most  appropriate  occasions,  is  about  as  wise 
as  for  a  surgeon  to  describe  to  a  patient  the  in- 
strument with  which  he  intends  to  operate  on 
him.  In  well  regulated  hospitals  the  patient  is 
mercifully  anaesthetized  before  he  sees  the  in- 
struments !  If  this  seems  to  lend  itself  to  the 
claim  that  the  ministry  should  be  an  esoteric 
profession  with  secrets  all  its  own,  we  dis- 
avow any  such  intention  forthwith.  There 
ought  not  to  be  any  secrets  to  be  kept  from 
anyone  who  desires  to  know.  Nor  are  we  urg- 
ing any  preacher  to  keep  back  from  his  people 
any  part  of  the  truth.  We  are  simply  saying 
that  the  sound  and  reasonable  public  demand 
in  every  sphere  is  for  results  and  not  for  the 
discussion  of  processes  except  for  those  who 
wish  such  discussion.  The  Bible  is  the  food  of 
the  soul.  It  is  the  business  of  the  preacher  to 
put  the  food  before  the  people  in  attractive 
form.  I  know  a  fine  establishment  where  most 
excellent  food  is  supplied  to  the  customers; 
but  opposite  every  item  on  the  bill  of  fare  is 

38 


THE  PREACHER'S  USE  OF  THE   BIBLE 

printed  the  exact  number  of  the  calories  which 
a  given  unit  of  the  food  can  be  expected  to 
yield.  The  figures  are  disconcerting  and  appe- 
tite-destroying. All  talk  about  balanced  ra- 
tions, about  proteins  and  starches  and  car- 
bohydrates is  a  terrible  affliction  at  a  dinner 
table.  This  scientific  truth  is  valuable  for 
the  housewife  who  presides  over  the  cooking, 
but  she  ought  not  to  bring  the  formulas  to 
the  table. 

The  other  type  of  preacher  makes  no  use  of 
scientific  method  at  all.  So  that  we  have  from 
him  an  inaccurate  representation  of  biblical 
truth  which  may  lead  off  to  aberration.  Or, 
rather,  he  gives  himself  to  preaching  which  is 
not  fundamentally  biblical.  His  texts  are 
starting  points  to  almost  anywhere.  If  such 
a  preacher  is  of  lively  inventiveness,  or  pos- 
sesses a  touch  of  poetic  fancy,  or  is  so  mag- 
netic a  speaker  that  it  does  not  make  much 
difference  what  he  says,  the  lack  of  biblical 
understanding  may  not  noticeably  count.  We 
are  concerned,  however,  with  a  higher  grade 
of  preaching  than  this  if  we  are  to  meet  the 
deeper  popular  needs. 

There  remains  the  group  of  preachers — in- 
creasing, let  us  trust — who  get  all  the  light 
they  can  on  what  a  passage  meant  to  its  au- 
thor and  who  then  try  to  see  and  say  what  the 

39 


THE  PKEACHEK  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

passage  means  for  us  to-day.  In  other  words, 
they  take  the  Bible  as  dealing  with  living  men 
and  living  issues  in  its  day  and  then  try  to 
make  the  truth  live  for  our  day.  So  that  there 
comes  into  the  preaching  the  accent  of  life, 
w^hich  in  the  end  is  mighty  with  the  people. 
The  majority  on  the  face  of  this  earth  do  not 
live  in  a  make-believe  world.  We  might  say, 
therefore,  that  they  ought  to  be  lifted  out  of 
this  actual  world  for  an  hour  or  two  on  Sun- 
day and  transported  into  the  land  of  ideals. 
To  be  sure,  they  should;  but  woe  to  the 
preacher  who  brings  his  hearers  back  to  earth 
saying,  "After  all,  it  is  only  dreams  or  fancy." 
The  professional  entertainer  can  carry  hear- 
ers or  spectators  into  the  land  of  dreams,  but 
people  know  such  dreams  for  what  they  are 
and  do  not  expect  anything  solid.  The 
preacher,  on  the  other  hand,  is  dealing  with 
an  order  of  realities,  above  the  sordid  and 
humdrum  round  of  prosaic  activities.  He  is 
trying  to  make  men  see  that  there  is  a  sky  over 
the  earth,  but  it  must  be  a  sky  and  not  a 
painted  canvas.  The  depths  must  be  there, 
and  the  sun  and  stars  must  be  genuine.  Very 
truly  indeed  the  sky  we  see  is  not  the  sky  of 
the  astronomer,  but  our  sky  is  not  delusion  nor 
illusion.  We  may  have  to  make  repeated  cor- 
rections as  we  gaze  toward  the  heavens,  but 

40 


THE  PKEACHEE'S   USE  OF  THE   BIBLE 

we  are  dealing  with  something  real,  not  with 
the  skies  of  fairyland. 

Whatever  else  the  Bible  may  or  may  not  be, 
it  certainly  is  a  record  of  the  struggle  of  men 
grappling  with  substantial  problems.  The  at- 
tempt to  get  at  its  meaning  on  a  fact  basis  is 
a  step  toward  imparting  into  our  own  lives 
the  quick  awareness  of  the  real  which  marks 
the  Scriptures.  Keality  is  a  fearfully  over- 
worked word,  but  there  is  no  other.  In  this 
connection  we  may  refer  to  the  unwillingness 
of  the  biblical  leaders  to  befool  themselves, 
or  anyone  else.  One  difference  between  the 
Hebrews  and  the  peoples  round  about  was  just 
this  unwillingness  of  the  scriptural  leaders 
to  live  in  a  world  of  make-believe.  There  is 
an  element  of  faith  in  all  religious  knowledge. 
We  shall  have  occasion  later  to  lay  emphasis 
on  the  teaching  of  Jesus  that  out  of  the  will's 
doing  aright  there  comes  the  knowledge  of 
God.  Since  we  must  have  faith  let  us  have  a 
faith  based  not  on  what  we  think,  or  what  we 
feel,  but  upon  what  we  do.  Throughout  the 
Scriptures  obedience  leads  to  knowledge.  Not 
enough  emphasis  has  yet  been  placed  on  the 
opposition  which  appeared  among  the  He- 
brews at  least  as  early  as  the  time  of  Saul  to 
soothsayers  and  witches  as  revealers  of  divine 
knowledge,  or  on  the  absence  of  reliance  on 

41 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

trancelike  states  in  the  biblical  search  for 
truth.  When  the  seers  of  the  Bible  had  visions 
the  visions  were  something  worth  seeing. 

There  is  a  capacity  of  imagination  which 
spends  itself  in  painting  pictures  which  have 
no  touch  with  anything  actual  in  the  heavens 
or  on  the  earth,  an  imagination  which  may 
at  times  well  serve  us.  There  is  a  higher 
imagination  which  starts  on  a  basis  of 
fact  and  makes  the  facts  live,  not  as  bare 
facts,  but  as  facts  suggestive  of  far-reach- 
ing principles.  It  is  this  type  of  imagination 
for  which  the  preacher  who  would  grip  men 
where  they  live  must  seek,  the  type  that  be- 
holds the  men  of  the  Scriptures  actually  liv- 
ing in  an  actual  situation,  and  which  makes 
those  men  live  again  in  a  wider  relationship 
embodying  ever-recurring  problems  of  human 
experience.  If  we  can  once  see  these  men  as 
they  were,  we  shall  recognize  them  as  like  our- 
selves. It  is  the  task  of  the  preacher  to  make 
scriptural  characters  live  again,  that  we  may 
share  their  life. 


42 


IV 

HELPING  MEN  TO  UNDERSTAND 

One  of  the  most  Christian  words  in  our  lan- 
guage is  the  word  "help."  Help  does  not  mean 
doing  everything  for  a  man.  It  means  aiding 
a  man  to  make  the  most  of  his  own  powers. 
It  implies  one's  supplementing  another's 
own  strength.  Outright  giving  is  different.  To 
give  a  cripple  the  ability  to  walk  might  imply 
any  degree  of  power  up  to  the  miraculous.  To 
help  a  cripple  to  walk  might  mean  the  lending 
of  an  arm  on  which  the  unfortunate  might 
lean.  One  of  the  finest  New  Testament  charac- 
terizations of  the  Spirit  of  God  is  of  the  Spirit 
as  Helper — supplementing  our  powers  as  we 
ourselves  make  effort  to  exert  them  to  the  ut- 
most. 

In  putting  people  in  possession  of  the  truth 
the  aim  of  the  popular  preacher  should  be  to 
help,  first  of  all  to  help  to  understand.  We 
must  never  ignore  the  elementary  axiom  in 
psychology  that  a  mind  is  not  a  holder  of  so 
much  cubic  content.  The  mind  is  not  passive 
but  active.  Even  when  the  student  tells  us 
that  pictures  of  the  outside  world  are  photo- 

43 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

graphed  on  the  delicate  tissue  of  the  eye  we 
must  not  forget  that  someone  must  see  the 
picture,  and  that  seeing  the  picture  means 
building  it  in  the  mind  by  an  active  mental 
process.  We  can  take  the  boy  to  the  school,  but 
we  cannot  make  him  think  any  more  than  we 
can  make  him  eat  if  he  will  not  eat.  Thus  al- 
most at  once  we  dispose  of  one  type  of  author- 
ity in  preaching.  Dogmatism  in  preaching  is 
of  slight  value  unless  it  is  freely  assented  to 
by  the  hearer.  Formerly  w^hen  dogmatic  au- 
thority ruled  everywhere  even  hearers  in  the 
church  might  take  dogma  hospitably,  but 
dogma  is  not  by  its  nature  calculated  to  make 
men  understand.  We  doubt  if  some  dogma 
was  ever  intended  to  be  understood.  It  was  to 
be  believed,  and  belief  meant  a  bolting  of  in- 
tellectual food,  or  medicine,  without  much 
question. 

No  severer  intellectual  task  is  exacted  of 
any  professional  expert  than  this  of  helping 
men  to  understand.  Think  of  the  different 
grades  of  intelligence  in  any  audience,  no  mat- 
ter how  homogeneous  the  audience.  There  are 
children,  young  men  and  women,  mature  men 
and  women,  old  men  and  women.  Yet  it  is 
the  task  of  the  preacher  to  place  before  all,  in 
practically  the  same  statement,  truth  that  will 
minister  to  all  the  lives.    For  this  is  preaching, 

44 


HELPING  MEN  TO  UNDERSTAND 

the  setting  of  truth  before  men  so  that  it  can  be 
appropriated  for  a  life  purpose.  Every  effort 
is  to  be  directed  toward  such  appropriation. 
For  a  preacher  to  be  helpful  in  this  task  is  to 
deserve  highest  praise. 

The  first  step  is  to  help  people  to  under- 
stand. These  addresses  are  intended  to  be 
suggestive  rather  than  exhaustive.  May  I 
therefore  indicate  two  characteristics  of 
preaching  which  seem  to  me  to  be  always 
needed?  They  are  formally  contradictory 
though  the  contradiction  is  only  apparent.  I 
refer  to  the  power  to  simplify  and  the  power 
to  amplify.  Look  first  at  the  need  for  sim- 
plicity. The  purpose  of  the  preacher  should 
be  so  to  state  his  truth  that  the  lowest  normal 
intelligence  before  him  will  see  at  least  the  be- 
ginnings of  its  meaning.  We  are  not  pleading 
for  simplicity  of  thought  or  for  statement  that 
attempts  the  impossible  feat  of  rendering  the 
whole  gospel  of  the  Christlike  God  intelligible 
at  a  glance.  We  are  asking,  though,  for  the 
simplicity  of  statement  that  enables  even  the 
child  in  the  audience  to  see  some  distance  into 
the  truth. 

Let  not  anyone  imagine  that  we  are  calling 
for  an  easy  achievement  in  urging  the  im- 
portance of  simplicity.  For  simplicity  every- 
where costs.    We  have  been  told  in  a  conven- 

45 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

tional  formula  of  evolution  that  progress  is 
from  the  simple  to  the  complex.  Of  course  we 
understand  that  the  formula  is  declaring  that 
progress  comes  through  increasing  fineness  of 
adjustment  in  organisms.  There  is,  however, 
a  progress  from  the  complex  to  the  simple 
which  is  equally  important.  At  least  there  is 
a  demand  that  the  parts  of  which  the  complex 
is  composed  shall  be  themselves  simple.  The 
simpler  a  tool  the  better.  The  simpler  an 
artistic  creation  the  better.  The  simpler  a 
statement  the  better.  The  simpler  a  sermon 
the  better.  Moreover,  the  struggle  for  sim- 
plicity in  statement  is  one  of  the  hardest  of 
the  intellectual  strains. 

The  young  minister  makes  a  grievous  mis- 
take if  he  starts  in  to  preach  chiefly  to  what 
might  be  called  the  top  minds  of  his  congrega- 
tion. He  goes,  let  us  assume,  to  a  church  in 
which  he  has  before  him  Sunday  after  Sunday 
eight  or  ten  school-teachers,  two  or  three  law- 
yers, a  doctor  or  two,  possibly  one  or  two  re- 
tired ministers,  out  of  a  congregation  of  two 
hundred.  Suppose,  now,  that  he  keeps  think- 
ing, as  he  prepares  his  sermon,  of  these  fifteen 
or  twenty  persons  more  technically  educated 
than  their  fellows  in  the  community.  He  asks 
himself  if  this  select  number  will  be  pleased. 
He  judges  his  success  by  the  kind  words  they 

46 


HELPING  MEN  TO  UNDERSTAND 

say  to  him  after  the  sermon ;  and  if  their  praise 
is  forthcoming,  he  may  flatter  himself  that  he 
is  doing  an  intellectual  grade  of  preaching. 
Indeed,  the  preaching  may  be  of  a  noteworthy 
intellectual  quality ;  but  in  statement  at  least 
it  will  not  be  of  so  high  an  order  as  if  the 
preacher  had  spoken  with  the  one  hundred  and 
fifty  or  one  hundred  and  seventy-five  in  mind. 
It  is  not  possible  to  move  the  ordinary  audi- 
ence by  preaching  chiefly  to  the  top  intellects. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  a  man  is  so  skilled  in 
phrasing  his  truth  as  to  make  it  clear  to  the 
lowliest  intelligence,  he  benefits  every  intel- 
ligence above  the  lowliest  as  well.  More  than 
that,  the  higher  the  intelligence  the  more 
heartily  it  appreciates  simplicity  of  statement, 
just  as  the  higher  artistic  discernment  appre- 
ciates keenly  the  simple  in  painting  or  sculp- 
ture. It  is  only  the  half-intelligent  hearer 
who  delights  in  literary  or  historical  or  scien- 
tific allusions  which,  he  fancies,  no  one  else 
in  the  audience  can  appreciate  but  himself. 

In  every  sermon — with  an  allowance  for  an 
occasional  handling  of  a  peculiarly  difficult 
theme — there  should  be  some  passage  stating 
the  essential  thought  so  simply  that  it  will  be 
intelligible  to  the  child  of  school  age.  By  the 
way,  this  is  the  effective  preaching  to  children 
— to  beget  in  their  minds  an  alert  expectancy 

47 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

(if  the  preacher  is  interesting  at  all)  and  to 
make  them  feel  that  they  are  part  of  the  con- 
gregation. All  this  requires  intellectual 
power  in  the  preacher. 

Now,  someone  is  tempted  to  break  out  that 
our  emphasis  on  simplicity  is  overdone,  that 
nothing  profound  can  be  uttered  simply.  How 
could  anyone  phrase  simply  the  nebular  hy- 
pothesis, or  the  doctrine  of  evolution,  or  the 
law  of  diminishing  return?  The  subject  mat- 
ter of  religion  is  at  least  as  profound  as  the 
Einstein  theory  of  relativity,  and  magazines 
and  books  have  only  made  themselves  ridicu- 
lous in  trying  to  simplify  Einstein.  All  of 
which  might  be  pertinent  if  the  preacher  were 
to  be  conceived  of  as  an  expounder  of  theology 
or  philosophy.  His  duty,  however,  is  quite 
different — that  of  making  vital  to  men  the  life 
out  of  which  theology  comes.  We  shall  never 
get  anywhere  until  we  see  this  underlying  pur- 
pose of  preaching.  Let  the  preacher  enrich  his 
own  life  by  the  profoundest  theological  study 
of  which  he  is  capable,  but  before  his  congre- 
gation he  must  always  make  the  return  to  life. 
To  do  this  demands  strenuous  intellectual 
effort. 

The  second  power  which  the  preacher 
needs  in  helping  people  to  understand  is  that 
of  amplification.    This  does  not  mean  saying 

48 


HELPING  MEN  TO  UNDERSTAND 

the  same  thing  over  and  over  again  in  the  same 
way,  but  does  mean  looking  at  the  one  truth 
from  all  available  angles.  We  assume  that 
at  the  outset  the  preacher  has  chosen  some- 
thing worth  saying,  something  big  enough  to 
be  approached  from  a  variety  of  points  of  view. 
This  being  the  case,  it  is  well  if  the  preacher 
knows  how  to  make  the  one  essential  thought 
the  center  around  which  everything  marches, 
or  the  point  of  departure  from  which  every- 
thing in  the  sermon  starts  and  to  which  every- 
thing finally  returns.  We  remind  ourselves 
that  we  are  dealing  with  the  task  of  trying  to 
make  people  understand.  Few  listeners  in  the 
Sunday  congregation  are  impressed  even  with 
the  simplest  and  clearest  statement  on  the 
first  putting. 

In  the  search  for  efficiency  we  may  well  con- 
sent to  learn  from  present-day  advertisers  and 
newspaper  propagandists.  These  worthies  are 
indeed  usually  children  of  this  world,  but  they 
know  how  to  deal  with  their  contemporary  gen- 
eration. Their  problem  is  to  arouse  a  sus- 
tained public  interest  in  their  wares,  whether 
the  wares  be  material  or  of  a  more  intangible 
category.  The  trick  is  turned  by  finding  new 
and  arresting  ways  to  say  the  same  thing 
until  the  idea  finally  gets  through  and  sticks. 
It  is  astonishing  how  many  methods  these  ex- 

49 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

perts  discover  to  tell  us  where  to  buy  the  best 
shoe  or  automobile  or  how  to  get  rid  of  capital- 
ists or  Bolshevists.  With  a  nobler  subject  mat- 
ter the  preacher  ought  to  be  able  to  develop 
even  a  finer  skill  in  amplified  presentation. 

If  I  may  be  pardoned  a  word  of  reminis- 
cence, my  first  sermon,  delivered  over  a  quar- 
ter of  a  century  ago,  dealt  with  evolution,  mod- 
ern biblical  and  social  theories,  all  in  twenty 
minutes.  At  the  end  I  sank  into  the  pulpit 
chair  with  the  sickening  query  as  to  what  there 
was  left  for  the  next  Sunday.  Since  then  I 
have  learned,  I  trust,  something  of  the  wisdom 
of  Father  Tyrrell's  shrewd  comment  about 
breaking  bread  to  the  multitudes,  namely,  that 
breaking  bread  is  obviously  intended  to  get 
the  bread  into  small  enough  pieces  to  be  used. 
Without  irreverence  it  may  be  said  also  that 
preaching  is  an  art  of  almost  miraculously 
multiplying  the  pieces  till  the  multitude  is 
fed.  The  one  truth  is  broken  into  many  pieces 
by  the  preacher  and  each  piece  invested  with 
a  score  of  life-giving  qualities. 

Here,  again,  the  preacher  may  feel  that  he 
is  being  asked  to  perform  a  task  which  is  some- 
what beneath  his  trained  intellectual  powers. 
Let  him  not  deceive  himself  as  to  the  mental 
force  which  all  this  requires.  If  he  will  for- 
give another  reference  to  the  children  of  the 

50 


HELPING  MEN  TO  UNDERSTAND 

world,  let  him  remind  himself  that  the  talent 
of  a  first-class  advertiser  or  propagandist  is 
rare  and  costly.  If  we  were  dealing  with  sheer 
repetition,  the  situation  would  not  be  one 
calling  for  intense  intellectuality,  but  in 
preaching  the  repetition  must  be  with  a  differ- 
ence, and  it  is  that  difference  for  which  the 
preacher  has  to  pay  with  the  best  that  is  in 
him.  From  the  beginning  the  hearers  may  be 
willing  to  accept  the  preacher's  statement  of 
his  fundamental  proposition  without  disa- 
greement. They  may  even  ask  what  there  is 
in  such  a  proposition  to  discuss.  Why  not  say 
it  and  pass  on?  Some  of  the  greatest  sermonic 
victories  are  won  in  bringing  people  to  see  the 
force  of  truths  which  they  ordinarily  accept 
without  question.  The  preacher  surprises  such 
hearers  into  looking  at  the  old  idea  from  a  new 
angle  which  reveals  a  new  size,  or  shape,  or 
color ;  and  so  on  to  the  end — possibly  with  the 
listener  in  a  state  of  wonder  at  the  newness  of 
something  at  which  he  has  been  looking  all 
his  life. 

An  acute  student  once  told  me  of  his  satis- 
faction in  listening  to  the  lectures  of  the  late 
Josiah  Royce.  In  a  given  lecture  Royce  would 
deal  with  but  one  theme;  his  progress  through 
that  theme  had  something  of  the  circular, 
scouring  swing  of  a  rising  flood  of  waters 

51 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

which  advances  with  a  whirl  rather  than  with 
a  direct  attack.  ''So,"  said  my  friend,  "if  I 
don't  catch  him  fully  at  the  first  statement,  I 
catch  him  as  he  swings  around  again." 

Is  not  life  in  considerable  part  just  looking 
upon  a  few  elemental  truths  from  the  changing 
points  of  view  which  come  with  spiritual  ascent 
toward  higher  altitudes?  If  it  is  not  too  gro- 
tesque, may  we  not  say  that  our  spiritual 
ascent  is  like  the  spiral  rise  of  some  monarch 
of  flight  who  sees  below  him  always  the  same 
earth  or  sea  but  who  sees  it  ever  in  a  larger 
setting?  If  the  preacher  is  to  catch  anything 
of  the  secret  of  popular  ministry,  he  must 
acquire  this  power  to  help  men  see  again  and 
again  and  again  the  enlarging  meaning  of  some 
principles  they  may  think  they  understand  at 
first  glance. 


52 


HELPING  MEN  TO  THINK 

It  would  be  a  meager  ideal,  however,  which 
would  be  content  with  merely  helping  men  to 
understand.  A  hearer  might  understand  and 
yet  not  adequately  understand.  While  in  all 
the  responses  of  an  audience  to  a  preacher  the 
will  element  of  the  listeners  is  involved,  more 
is  required  for  full  understanding  than  barely 
the  degree  of  attention  and  grasp  of  the  speak- 
er's thought  w^hich  discerns  a  meaning.  The 
preaching  which  helps  people  gets  them  to  do 
everything  that  they  can  do  for  themselves. 
Hence  the  preacher  must  on  his  side  do  all  in 
his  power  to  help  his  people  to  think. 

We  have  spoken  in  the  previous  chapter 
about  the  need  of  amplification.  In  their  di- 
rect statement,  I  very  much  fear,  my  chapters 
will  seem  to  be  warring  with  one  another.  I 
may  seem  to  be  taking  back  in  one  section  all 
that  I  have  said  earlier.  Even  at  the  risk  of 
seeming  contradiction,  however,  may  I  warn 
that  with  all  his  amplifying  the  speaker  is  not 
to  amplify  too  much.  In  the  development  of 
the  theme  itself  he  should  leave  something  to 

53 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

the  constructive  activity  of  the  listener.  Un- 
derstand, again,  what  preaching  is,  or  what 
it  is  not.  It  is  not  the  bare  communication  of 
fact.  Facts  there  must  be,  but  facts  with 
meanings  and  implications.  If  the  preacher 
were  a  scientist  stating  an  exact  formula  and 
were  to  leave  out  one  factor,  the  formula  would 
not  work.  If  he  were  a  physician  writing  a 
prescription,  it  would  be  imperative  to  get 
everything  in,  and  in  the  exact  proportions. 
If  he  were  a  lawyer,  it  would  be  necessary  to 
introduce  the  last  shred  of  evidence.  While 
the  preacher  at  times  makes  statements  like 
those  of  a  scientist  or  a  physician  or  a  lawyer, 
primarily  he  is  a  life-giver,  and  life-giving 
means  the  calling  forth  of  men's  own  powers. 
So  that  the  wise  preacher  is  not  he  who  says 
everything  himself.  Better  leave  a  sermon  no- 
ticeably incomplete,  if  the  hearer  is  thereby 
compelled  to  think  out  a  conclusion  for  him- 
self, than  to  allow  the  hearer  always  to  quit 
the  church  saying:  "That  is  final.  That  is 
finished.  That  is  settled."  If  the  issue  is  a 
practical  surrender  of  will  in  consecration,  the 
sermon  should  lead  to  finality,  but  we  are  not 
thinking  of  such  surrender  just  now.  In  the 
etymological  sense  the  preacher  should  be  an 
educator — he  should  seek  to  lead  out  the  possi- 
bilities of  his  hearers.    Or  if  the  Christian  life 

54 


HELPING  MEN  TO  THINK 

is  fundamentally  walking  with  God,  he  should 
try  to  help  men  to  walk;  he  should  not  carry 
them  or  provide  intellectual  vehicles  for  them, 
or  even  allow  them  to  lean  too  heavily  on  him- 
self. It  is  sometimes  said  that  the  most  com- 
petent executive  never  himself  does  anything 
that  he  can  get  anyone  else  to  do.  So  it  might 
be  said  that  the  most  competent  speaker  will 
not  himself  say  what  he  can  get  his  hearers  to 
say.  This  stands  in  need  of  qualification — 
qualification  which  we  shall  make  in  due  time, 
but  it  does  state  an  aspect  of  wisdom  which 
should  not  be  overlooked. 

A  second  rule  for  helping  hearers  to  think 
is  to  use  stimulating  figures  of  speech.  If 
speech  has  one  characteristic  above  another  as 
a  revealer  of  the  common  mind  that  character- 
istic is  the  tendency  to  the  figurative  in  any 
utterance  at  all  popular.  Every  step  away 
from  the  concrete  to  the  abstract  is  a  step  away 
from  the  people's  thinking.  The  power  of  ab- 
stract utterance  is,  to  be  sure,  one  of  the  great- 
est gifts  to  the  human  mind,  and  this  power 
is  granted  only  to  the  masters ;  but  the  power 
over  the  abstract  is  not  the  only  mastery  which 
deserves  to  be  called  great.  All  leaders  in  lit- 
erature as  such  have  been  masters  of  the  con- 
crete. 

The  virtue  of  the  figure  for  the  preacher  is 

55 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

that  it  makes  a  connection  for  his  sermon  with 
the  world  of  things  in  which  his  hearers  live. 
Abstract  logical  coherences  mean  little  to  most 
of  us.  We  live  among  things  and  among  peo- 
ple, and  the  very  fact  that  one  thing  is  related 
to  another  establishes  in  the  mind  of  the  hearer 
threads  of  relationship  which  may  indeed  not 
be  logical  but  which  are  altogether  vital  never- 
theless. For  simple  illustration  of  figurative 
utterance  as  the  prolific  producer  of  utterance 
from  those  who  hear,  think  of  an  apt  figure 
of  speech  in  a  prayer  meeting  as  a  stimulus  to 
talk.  One  reason  why  prayer  meetings  are 
often  so  lifeless  is  that  nothing  in  the  remarks 
of  the  leader  starts  others  to  talking.  There 
is  no  hook  by  which  we  can  take  hold.  If  a 
happy  turn  of  phrase  pricks  minds  into  think- 
ing, the  meeting  is  likely  to  be  interesting 
enough. 

I  once  dropped  into  a  noonday  prayer  service 
in  a  large  city  where  the  attendants  were 
mostly  day  laborers  just  off  the  streets.  One 
often  hears  the  most  striking  figures  of  speech 
used  in  such  meetings  to  set  forth  conceptions 
of  the  religious  experience.  The  meeting  of 
which  I  speak  was  dragging  heavily  until  a 
teamster  arose  who  emphasized  the  need  of 
dying  to  self  in  order  to  live  unto  Christ.  He 
concluded  by  saying  that  he  came  into  the 

56 


HELPING  MEN  TO  THINK 

kingdom  of  heaven  by  the  "death-route,"  The 
figure  did  not  appeal  to  me  as  extraordinarily 
appropriate  or  even  elegant,  but  it  took.  That 
is  to  say,  it  caught  the  imagination  of  the 
crowd,  and  the  meeting  noticeably  livened  up. 

All  that  I  am  now  saying  must  be  understood 
within  the  limitations  imposed  by  good  sense 
and  good  taste,  but  the  effectiveness  of  the 
figurative  to  quicken  hearers  to  thought  and 
speech  on  their  own  account  must  not  be  de- 
spised. It  is  distressing  to  see  a  figure  go  on 
all  fours,  but  not  so  distressing  as  not  to  see 
it  go  at  all.  If  we  were  to  drop  out  of  Chris- 
tian thinking  all  that  has  been  implied  by  fig- 
ures of  speech,  we  should  not  have  much  left. 
With  Christ  as  the  Way,  and  the  Light,  and  the 
Shepherd  and  the  Sower,  the  disciples  have 
heard  from  the  beginning  figures  so  suggestive 
that  almost  of  themselves  these  figures  have 
carried  the  minds  of  believers  along  to  inevita- 
ble progress. 

Again,  the  preacher  must  cultivate  that 
sense  of  balance  in  utterance  which  enables 
him  to  put  truth  positively  and  boldly,  boldly 
enough  even  to  provoke  a  reaction  in  some 
quarters.  Balance — balance — balance — how 
many  sins  of  public  speech  are  committed  in 
thy  name !  Because  of  the  excesses  of  the  half- 
baked  or  the  unripe  we  have  been  told  that  in 

57 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

discussing  spiritual  themes  we  must  keep  our 
balance — and  be  sane !  That  word  "sane"  has 
been  so  abused  in  these  latter  days  that  any 
forth-right  preacher  of  positive  temperament 
might  well  consider  himself  offered  a  deadly 
affront  in  being  called  "sane."  For  balancing 
too  often  means  thrusting  in  qualifications  too 
trifling  to  be  mentioned  as  compared  with  the 
main  idea.  The  fact  that  some  qualifications 
are  even  mentioned  gives  them  a  significance 
not  inherently  belonging  to  them.  A  diag- 
nostician summoned  to  determine  whether  a 
patient  had  heart  trouble  would  not  feel  it 
necessary  to  prepare  his  report  of  a  serious 
disorder  by  complimenting  the  patient  on  the 
color  of  his  hair  or  the  contour  of  his  face. 
Genuine  balance  goes  straight  to  the  center 
of  a  trouble  in  the  effort  to  restore  a  lost 
equilibrium.  If  a  boat  is  liable  to  capsize, 
the  sudden  shout  to  the  crew  is  the  only  bal- 
anced procedure.  If  the  house  is  on  fire,  too 
studied  utterance  is  the  mark  of  serious  mental 
handicap.  The  Old  Testament  prophets  were 
not  particularly  given  to  padding  their  sen- 
tences with  the  purpose  of  bringing  all  possible 
qualifications  of  any  idea  within  the  field  of 
view.  Elijah  running  eighteen  miles  in  frenzy 
before  the  chariot  of  Ahab  does  not  strike  us 
as  altogether  sane,  and  yet  Elijah  was  sane 

J  58 


HELPING  MEN  TO  THINK 

enough  to  see  that  the  conflict  between  the 
Jehovah  of  Israel  and  the  Baal  of  Phoenicia 
had  to  be  a  battle  to  the  death.  If  preaching 
means  anything,  it  means  that  the  preacher 
is  dealing  with  themes  heavily  weighted  with 
spiritual  values.  The  preacher  is  not,  in  the 
pulpit  at  least,  a  judge  making  a  decision  be- 
tween fine  issues.  The  issues  are  compara- 
tively simple  in  sermons — or  they  ought  to  be 
— and  the  sermons  should  be  positive  enough  to 
carry  the  hearer  along  or  to  throw  him  into 
opposition. 

We  urge  with  all  our  might  that  this  is  not 
a  plea  for  rashness.  We  are  not  striving  for 
that  brand  of  harangue  or  invective  which 
splits  churches.  We  are  not  sanctioning  the 
introduction  of  needlessly  divisive  elements 
into  preaching,  but  we  do  feel  that  the  preach- 
ing should  be  strong  enough  either  to  call 
forth  the  amen  from  the  hearer  which  shows 
that  his  mind  is  actively  sanctioning,  or,  on 
the  other  hand,  to  put  the  hearer  into  the  op- 
position which  shows  that  his  mind  is  fully 
alert.  If  we  could  have  divisions  under 
preaching  without  splitting  congregations,  the 
outcome  would  be  spiritually  wholesome. 

Suppose,  however,  the  preacher  is  mistaken ; 
suppose  he  is  in  a  particular  sermon  off  his 
balance.     We  are  not  dealing  with  cracked 

59 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

brains,  but  with  men  of  training  and  sacrifice 
who  have  never  passed  through  any  unfor- 
tunate cerebral  crises.  We  affirm  of  such  men 
that  if  they  honestly  overstate  a  position,  or 
even  if  they  abound  in  contradictions,  some 
good  will  result  in  the  end  by  the  quickening  of 
Christian  thinking,  if  in  no  other  way.  There 
is  a  measure  of  justice  in  the  claim  that  the 
ages  of  controversy  in  the  church  have  also 
been  the  ages  of  progress,  provided  the  con- 
troversies have  not  been  so  bitter  as  to  let  in 
unrighteous  tempers  or  to  lead  to  the  use  of 
carnal  weapons.  For  thinking  is  of  the  es- 
sence of  the  religious  experience,  and  while 
men  have  been  thinking  they  have  been  gen- 
erating life  religiously  self-communicating. 
As  for  contradictions,  we  can  never  afford  to 
drop  out  of  our  reckoning  the  contradictions 
of  thinkers  as  a  factor  in  progress.  A  student 
of  philosophy  once  remarked  of  Kant  that  if 
Kant  had  himself  cleared  his  system  of  contra- 
dictions, there  would  not  have  been  much  work 
for  the  philosophers  of  the  one  hundred  years 
following  Kant. 

Finally,  the  preacher  must  have  confidence 
in  the  soil  into  which  he  casts  the  seed  which 
is  the  Word  of  God.  He  must  get  rid  of  the 
paternal  in  his  relation  to  his  hearers  if  he  is 
to  deal  fairly  with  them  as  hearers  of  the  word. 

60 


HELPING  MEN  TO  THINK 

If  the  farmer  did  not  know  beforehand  the 
course  through  which  a  grain  of  wheat  runs 
after  it  is  planted  in  the  ground,  he  might  see 
nothing  but  destruction  in  what  the  soil  at  first 
does  with  the  grain,  if  he  could  behold  the  un- 
derground processes.  Swollen,  burst,  torn  to 
shreds  is  the  seed  after  the  properties  of  the 
soil  get  their  chance  at  it ;  but  that  is  not  the 
end  of  the  story.  The  harvest  is  the  end  of  the 
story.  So  with  the  mind's  attack  on  the  word 
of  the  Truth.  The  Truth  at  first  is  apparently 
torn  into  shreds  by  the  soil  of  the  mind,  the 
difference  between  soil  and  minds  being  that 
the  minds  are  likely  to  speak  out  as  to  what 
is  going  on.  Now,  the  preacher  must  not 
meddle  too  much  with  the  consequences  of  his 
own  preaching.  His  preaching  should  have 
consequences.  One  of  the  watchwords  of  mod- 
ern education  is  "investigation  by  the  pupil 
under  guidance" — a  fine  watchword  for  the 
preacher,  if  he  is  willing  to  let  the  truth  come 
to  a  harvest  with  which  he  may  not  wholly 
agree.  If  the  preacher  is  patient  and  tolerant 
and  commands  the  confidence  of  his  people, 
only  good  can  come  of  his  stimulating  the 
people  to  think.  The  danger  is  that  the 
preacher  may  become  scared  at  the  results  of 
his  own  preaching  and  attempt  to  stop  the 
thought  processes  at  some  fixed  limit.     Then 

61 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

there  is  a  bursting-forth  that  may  seem  to  him 
very  alarming.  Fundamentally,  though,  this 
is  only  the  Christian  soil  insisting  upon  its 
right  to  deal  with  the  Christian  seed  in  the 
manner  that  leads  to  the  Christian  harvest. 


VI 

THE  GUIDANCE  OF  KELIGIOUS 
FEELING 

It  has  been  our  wish  to  arrange  the  themes 
of  this  section  in  the  order  of  their  importance, 
ascending  constantly  to  higher  phases.  Only 
roughly  can  one  phase  of  religious  experience 
be  called  more  important  than  another.  More- 
over, in  dealing  with  thought  and  feeling  and 
deed  successively  we  are  likely  to  fall  into  the 
fallacy  that  these  aspects  of  spiritual  activity 
are  somehow  separate  from  one  another, 
whereas  there  cannot  be  pure  thought  or  pure 
feeling  or  pure  will.  Thought,  will,  and  feel- 
ing presuppose  each  the  others.  We  can  see, 
however,  that  in  one  or  another  phase  the  ele- 
ment of  thought  or  feeling  or  volition  may  pre- 
dominate. 

In  considering  religious  feeling  we  may  well 
remember  that  human  values  have  their  seat 
for  us  in  the  sensibility.  We  shall  try  to  show 
in  our  next  section  that  the  final  goal  of  preach- 
ing is  to  produce  action,  or  at  least  attitudes  by 
wills.  This  is  not,  however,  for  the  sake  of 
just  getting  things  done;  instead  the  object  is 

63 


THE  PEEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

the  spiritual  and  inner  consequences  following 
to  him  who  acts  and  to  him  who  is  the  acted 
upon.  In  one  sense  even  the  action  toward 
which  the  preaching  drives  is  not  the  end  but 
the  beginning.  Preaching  directs  itself  to- 
ward the  will.  The  wise  preacher  strives  to 
start  men  to  thinking  and  to  make  them  feel 
deeply  in  order  that  they  may  set  their  wills 
toward  God.  With  the  will  thus  set  the  value 
of  the  will's  attitude  is  shown  in  the  pro- 
founder  thinking  and  the  profounder  feeling 
which  then  arise  anew  out  of  the  religious 
obedience. 

So  we  must  not  neglect  to  help  men  to  feel. 
We  must  do  all  we  can  to  arouse  and  guide 
feeling.  If  a  preacher  can  take  an  audience  of 
two  hundred  or  two  thousand  people,  coming 
to  church  on  Sunday  tired  and  jaded  after  the 
toil  of  the  week,  and  merely  send  them  away 
"feeling  better"  after  the  sermon,  that  is  worth 
while.  This,  by  the  way,  is  the  secret  of  the 
power  of  some  preachers  whom  their  contem- 
poraries occasionally  look  down  upon  as  not 
especially  intellectual.  The  hearers  may  not 
remember  long  what  such  a  preacher  says. 
They  do  not  know  what  it  is  about  him  that 
helps,  but  something  helps.  The  help  is  the 
glow  and  contagion  of  a  live  humanity.  There 
is  warmth,  even  fire  in  the  better  sense.    As 

64 


GUIDANCE  OF  RELIGIOUS  FEELING 

long  as  daily  existence  rushes  at  such  break- 
neck speed  as  now  we  may  be  grateful  for  such 
life-bringers.  We  who  try  to  preach  should 
strive  always  to  keep  ourselves  even  in  such 
physical  condition  that  everything  about  us 
suggests  quickening  and  enkindling  vitality. 

Here  we  may  as  well  speak  of  a  certain  aes- 
thetic possibility  even  in  the  shaping  of  the 
sermon  itself.  Not  many  men  who  sit  in  the 
pews  are  able  to  judge  a  sermon  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  finer  shades  of  skill  in  workman- 
ship, but  almost  all  realize  the  difference  be- 
tween a  sermon  which  shows  traits  of  an  art- 
ist's craftsmanship  and  one  which  reveals  bun- 
gling. Sermonic  beauty  has  little  to  do  with 
ornament — with  quotations  of  poetry  or  al- 
lusions to  flowers.  Beauty  may  be  inherent  in 
the  structure  of  the  sermon  itself — in  its  pro- 
portions, in  the  directness  of  its  phrasing,  and 
in  the  dignity  of  all  its  material.  As  likely  as 
not  the  stamp  of  beauty  may  add  marvelously 
to  the  effectiveness  of  the  sermon  as  an  instru- 
ment. Every  generation  has  to  mold  over  a 
deal  of  raw  thought  stuff  which  has  been  with 
men  from  the  beginning.  Each  generation 
must  shape  this  thought  into  terms  of  expres- 
sion of  its  own.  Since  the  instinctive  craving 
of  men  is  for  excellence  in  that  something  we 
call  "style,"  and  since  this  craving  shows  itself 

65 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PP:OPLE 

in  all  realms  of  creative  effort,  the  minister 
may  well  seek  to  meet  this  demand  in  his 
preaching.  There  is  a  professionalism  which 
is  ruinous  to  the  preaching  of  the  gospel.  There 
is  a  nobler  professionalism  which  sets  the  gos- 
pel on  high.  The  people  are  drawn  by  this 
highly  skilled  mastery  of  preaching  whether 
they  can  describe  just  what  it  is  or  not. 

As  with  the  sense  of  beauty  so  also  with  the 
sense  of  humor.  This  too  has  its  place  in 
preaching.  We  are  speaking  of  the  guidance 
or  control  of  feeling  to  religious  ends.  Con- 
trol does  not  necessarily  mean  repression. 
When  we  tell  a  child  to  control  his  feelings  we 
too  often  mean  that  he  shall  not  laugh  or  cry. 
Control  ought  to  mean  use  for  the  highest  pur- 
poses. We  do  not  have  in  mind  the  joke-teller 
when  we  say  that  preaching  should  show  a 
sense  of  humor.  For  much  opposition  to  Chris- 
tianity vanishes  in  an  atmosphere  charged 
with  an  appreciation  of  the  humorous.  Ridi- 
cule has  often  been  deadly  as  a  foe  of  some 
forms  of  Christianity,  but  ridicule  can  be  even 
more  deadly  when  turned  against  the  enemies 
of  Christianity.  There  is  indeed  a  heart- 
broken skepticism  among  men  which  comes  out 
of  sheer  disappointment,  of  thwarted  plans,  of 
shattered  dreams.  Such  skepticism  is  entitled 
to  respect  because  of  the  human  agony  out  of 

66 


GUIDANCE  OF  KELIGIOUS  FEELING 

which  it  springs.  There  is  another  skepticism, 
that  of  intellectual  arrogance  and  spiritual 
conceit.  This  is  entitled  to  no  more  respect 
now  than  when  the  old  prophet  let  the  fierce- 
ness of  his  wit  play  around  the  idea  of  a  Baal 
who  perchance  was  asleep  and  had  to  be 
awakened.  Elijah's  fire  of  sarcasm  on  the 
heads  of  the  priests  of  Baal  was  almost  as  con- 
vincing as  the  fire  which  afterward  fell  on  the 
sacrifice.  So  too  with  the  scorn  of  Isaiah  over 
the  idol-makers  who  used  the  left-over  idol 
stuff  for  fuel. 

There  is  another  and  deeper  meaning  in  hu- 
mor. It  is  akin  to  the  satisfaction  we  feel 
when  we  see  a  hard  problem  solved,  or  some- 
thing out  of  place  put  into  place.  The  smile  on 
the  faces  of  men  as  they  behold  a  problem  fall 
into  orderly  solution  is  not  only  the  joy  of  re- 
lief. It  is  the  satisfaction  which  arises  as  the 
feeling  for  the  fitness  of  things  is  gratified. 
One  of  the  most  encouraging  of  scriptural 
promises  is  that  those  who  mourn  shall  one  day 
laugh.  If  mourning  comes  partly  as  the  sense 
of  strain  when  things  are  wrong,  laughter 
should  follow  when  all  things  fall  into  their 
proper  place. 

There  may  be  decided  resentment  at  the  sug- 
gestion that  one  element  in  popular  preaching 
should  be  the  right  use  of  pathos.    Pathos  in. 

67 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

the  pulpit  has  been  fearfully  abused  and  that 
too  because  of  the  popular  demand  for  pathos. 
Some  of  the  contempt  which  many  good  people 
feel  toward  popular  appeal  as  ordinarily  un- 
derstood is  directed  at  the  emphasis  which 
preachers  have  so  often  laid  on  tears  as  the  sur- 
est sign  that  speech  is  effective  with  an  audi- 
ence. Surely,  there  is  a  diviner  pathos  than 
that  which  the  moving  picture  or  the  cheap 
novel  strives  after.  There  must  be  a  higher 
pulpit  pathos  than  what  the  youngsters  to-day 
call  "sob-stuff,"  if  we  are  not  to  abandon  the 
pathetic  altogether. 

The  fundamental  element  in  the  popular  re- 
sponse to  pathos  is  not  a  wanton  propensity  on 
the  part  of  hearers  toward  the  maudlin.  If 
the  response  to  the  pathetic  is  not  thoroughly 
bridled,  it  does  indeed  soon  become  maudlin; 
but  bridles  are  instruments  for  guidance 
and  not  for  repression.  Underneath  our  re- 
sponse to  the  pathetic  is  the  recognition  of  the 
universal  fact  of  tragedy  in  life.  A  hearer  who 
Sunday  after  Sunday  listens  to  sermons  which 
betray  no  trace  of  recognition  of  the  shadow 
which  always  hangs  over  human  life  begins 
to  wonder  if  he  is  hearing  true  preaching.  A 
presentation  of  human  life  in  which  the  sun- 
shine always  predominates  is  simply  not 
sound.    We  need  not  be  tearful  nor  gloomy, 

68 


GUIDANCE  OF  RELIGIOUS  FEELING 

but  we  recognize  life  as  it  is  when  we  let  the 
shadows  touch  the  presentation  of  the  truth. 
Life  is  neither  the  glare  of  the  mid-daj  nor  the 
blackness  of  midnight.  It  is  a  half-light,  or 
a  landscape  over  which  the  clouds  float.  All 
the  masters  of  pathos  have  known  the  control 
of  light  and  shade,  which,  as  in  all  art,  plays 
so  large  a  part  in  effectiveness.  To  ignore  the 
shadow  altogether  brings,  as  we  have  said,  a 
hint  of  falsity.  To  speak  too  bluntly  of  sorrow 
and  tragedy  is  cruelty,  but  there  is  a  course 
in  between  which  cannot  be  prescribed  or  de- 
scribed, which  touches  firmly  and  yet  lightly, 
and  more  by  suggestion  than  by  direct  state- 
ment. Happy  the  preacher  who  in  just  a  word 
can  call  up  a  forgotten  boyhood,  or  people 
the  memory  again  with  faces  that  have  faded 
from  sight,  or  recall  to  us  the  dreams  of  youth, 
or  so  throw  light  upon  a  grief  or  a  defeat  that 
we  feel  soothed  and  gratified  rather  than  har- 
assed or  distracted.  Happier  still  if  the  mas- 
ter in  the  pulpit  knows  how  so  to  clothe  all 
experience  with  majesty  or  sublimity  that  the 
feeling  of  pathos  is  transfused  into  the  feeling 
of  awe  and  wonder. 

People  will  respond  to  this  loftier  emotion-  * 
alism.    They  may  not  know  exactly  the  differ- 
ence between  the  true  and  the  false  note  struck 
upon  the  feelings,  but  they  are  aware  of  the 

€9 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

difference,  and  in  the  long  run  yield  to  the  true 
note.  Among  the  most  widely  read  passages 
of  Scripture  are  those  that  touch  upon  the 
pathetic.  The  story  of  Joseph,  the  cry  of 
David  over  Absalom,  the  mourning  of  the  wor- 
shipers by  the  streams  of  Babylon,  to  say 
nothing  of  the  inexpressible  sadness  of  the 
more  sacred  scenes  in  the  life  of  our  Lord, 
are  among  the  passages  to  which  Bible  readers 
by  the  scores  of  thousands  turn  first. 

We  are  not  to  attempt  a  catalogue  of  the 
feelings  of  the  human  heart.  May  we  speak, 
however,  about  the  enthusiasm  for  the  Christ- 
like God?  We  do  not  wish  to  make  conscience 
an  emotion,  or  put  moral  feelings  on  the  same 
plane  as  the  aesthetic,  though  all  are  indeed 
manifestations  of  spiritual  life.  If,  by  the 
way,  we  think  it  worth  while  to  coin  such 
terms  as  "omnipotence,"  "omnipresence,"  and 
"omniscience"  as  describing  a  God  deserving 
worship,  we  might  just  as  well  coin  one  more 
term  and  speak  of  God's  "omnisensibility,"  by 
which  we  would  mean  God's  power  to  gather 
up  within  himself  all  worthy  phases  of  feeling, 
especially  the  feeling  revealed  in  Christ.  I 
spoke  in  one  of  my  opening  pages  about  mak- 
ing men  believe  the  good  news  about  God.  If 
we  can  believe  that  in  Christ  we  have  the  heart 
of  God  laid  bare ;  if  it  is  true  that  the  Christ- 

70 


GUIDANCE  OF  RELIGIOUS  FEELING 

spirit  and  feeling  rules  at  the  center  of  the 
universe;  if,  without  regard  to  theological 
speculation  about  the  Logos,  Christ  expresses 
the  meaning  for  which  all  things  were  made; 
if  we  can  believe  all  this  and  make  men  believe 
it,  we  have  touched  the  springs  of  an  uncon- 
querable enthusiasm,  which  does  not,  indeed, 
give  itself  to  tumult  or  to  shouting,  but  which 
moves  forward  nevertheless  to  the  conquest  of 
the  world. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  preacher  to  create 
reserves  of  enthusiasm  that  do  not  run  off  in 
flood  and  escape.  To  this  end  there  should  be 
something  about  preaching  which  solidifies  the 
enthusiasm  for  the  nobler  values  and  stores 
it  in  the  realm  of  permanent  motive  or  impulse. 
A  great  worker  for  his  fellow  men  was  once 
asked  if  with  so  many  drains  on  his  compassion 
he  did  not  at  times  fear  that  his  pity  would  dry 
up.  His  reply  was  that  pity  as  a  conscious 
state  of  feeling  might  indeed  come  and  go,  but 
that  pity  as  a  motive  remained.  Likewise 
rightly  to  control  the  emotions  of  the  people 
who  hear  us  preach  is  not  to  encourage  that 
expression  with  which  the  emotions  vanish, 
but  to  sink  them  down  to  that  realm  where  they 
abide  among  the  lasting  motives  of  our  lives. 


71 


VII 

THE  QUICKENING  OF  THE  WILL 

We  have  said  that  we  have  planned  to  ar- 
range these  chapters  in  an  ascending  scale. 
We  come  to  the  most  important  of  all  in  this 
aspect  of  our  consideration  of  preaching — 
preaching  as  a  help  to  make  men  act. 

The  will  must  stand  at  the  center  of  any  sys- 
tem of  religion  which  is  to  be  fair  to  all  men, 
to  people  as  we  find  them,  for  the  will  is  the 
one  force  over  which  each  of  us  has  a  measure 
of  control.  If  the  kingdom  of  God  had  at  its 
entrance  welcome  only  to  thinkers,  it  would 
shut  out  multitudes.  If  it  welcomed  only  those 
capable  of  rapt  states  of  emotional  experiences, 
it  would  shut  out  other  multitudes.  When, 
however,  the  requirement  is  that  men  do  the 
will  of  God,  that  test  is  one  which  every  man 
can  reacL — a  test  which  is  within  the  grasp  of 
the  child  and  of  the  sage,  of  the  barbarian  and 
of  the  philosopher,  of  the  bond  and  of  the  free. 
The  will  of  God  cannot  mean  the  same  for  all 
alike,  or  for  any  two  alike,  but  so  far  as  it  can 
be  understood  by  each  it  can  be  obeyed  by  each. 
This  makes  the  kingdom  of  God  a  kingdom  of 
us  all. 

72 


THE  QUICKENING  OF  THE  WILL 

What  do  we  mean  by  doing  the  will  of  God? 
We  mean  simply  doing  whatever  appeals  to  our 
thought  and  conscience  as  the  will  of  God.  If 
we  are  to  erect  artificial  tests,  of  course  we  may 
find  ourselves  in  confusion,  but  we  have  in 
mind  something  more  fundamental.  By  doing 
the  will  of  God  we  mean  in  the  last  analysis 
the  resolution  to  live  in  the  spirit  of  the  Christ- 
like God.  Many  of  us  have  become  perplexed 
at  some  expositions  of  the  doctrine  of  the  "wit- 
ness of  the  Spirit"  so  called.  Rightly  inter- 
preted the  doctrine  can  only  mean  the  witness 
of  assurance,  the  firmness  of  conviction  of  the 
presence  of  God  which  is  the  heart  of  Chris- 
tian privilege.  The  doctrine  has  indeed  often 
been  expounded  as  a  mystic,  almost  magic  tes- 
timony in  an  altogether  extraordinary  inner 
feeling.  To  one  perplexed  it  may  be  well  to 
remember  that  there  is  a  witness  a  good  man 
can  always  have,  namely,  the  witness  of  his 
own  spirit.  He  can  know  what  he  intends  to 
do.  He  can  know  what  side  he  chooses.  He 
can  know  what  world  of  values  he  votes  for. 
To  bring  men  to  deliberate  purposef  ulness  like 
this  is  a  major  part  of  Christian  preaching. 

We  repeat  that  it  is  the  duty  of  preaching  to 
help.  Just  as  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  fair 
in  that  it  puts  forth  a  test  for  admission  within 
the  reach  of  every  man,  so  it  is  fair  also  in  that 

73 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

it  seeks  for  the  free — not  the  compelled — as- 
sent of  a  man's  will.  No  preaching  is  justified 
that  finally  overrides  the  wills  of  men.  Sup- 
pose a  preacher  to  have  a  strong  overwhelm- 
ing personality  which  in  an  irresistible  rush 
carries  men  along  with  it  toward  righteous- 
ness. Righteousness  is  indeed  good  on  its  own 
account,  but  such  compelling  preaching  would 
not  be  altogether  Christian.  Christianity 
never  encourages  reliance  upon  another  to  act 
for  us.  It  rests  down  upon  profounder  respect 
for  human  choices  than  we  often  realize.  Jesus 
said:  "Behold,  I  stand  at  the  door  and 
knock."  Jesus  would  not  have  been  loyal  to 
any  trait  of  his  own  gospel  to  have  forced  an 
entrance.  The  only  Christian  compulsion  is  a 
compulsory  attraction  which  persuades.  So 
that  Christian  preaching  is  to  be  conceived  as 
helpful,  setting  before  minds  noble  courses, 
and  aiding  men  to  feel  the  pull  of  a  new  af- 
fection. 

In  helping  men  to  side  with  God  and  to  do 
his  will  the  preacher  can  clear  the  ground  of 
some  misconceptions,  one  of  them  that  doing 
the  will  of  God  involves  necessarily  a  new  and 
different  round  of  deeds  so  far  as  the  deeds 
themselves  are  concerned.  If  the  problem  is 
that  of  a  life  abandoning  a  career  of  selfishness 
and  transgression,  a  different  course  of  con- 

74 


THE  QUICKENING  OF  THE  WILL 

duct — even  involving  violent  change  from  the 
past — is  admittedly  necessary.  Moreover,  as  I 
shall  try  to  show  later,  society  in  its  moral 
progress  discerns  that  some  activities  are  evil 
which  were  once  esteemed  good,  and  again  the 
Christian  must  break  with  the  past.  For  many, 
many  people,  however,  doing  the  wdll  of  God 
would  not  necessitate  action  different  from 
previous  conduct.  The  conduct  as  conduct  has 
been  worthy.  The  difference  would  be  in  the 
new  deliberate  purpose  of  the  will  in  the  do- 
ing. If  the  purpose  has  been  selfish,  it  must 
be  made  unselfish.  If  it  has  been  indifferent, 
it  must  be  charged  with  purpose.  If  the  work 
as  such  is  worth  doing  at  all,  it  is  worth  doing 
with  all  the  might  of  a  Christian  will.  We  say 
this,  commonplace  as  it  is,  because  so  many  of 
us  judge  the  success  of  Christian  preaching 
by  the  degree  to  w^hich  preachers  arouse  men 
to  bustling  activity  specifically  religious. 
Every  churchman  seems  to  wish  his  church  to 
be  a  hive,  which  is  well  enough  if  the  honey 
produced  is  worth  eating.  Possibly  churches 
are  not  doing  enough  in  specifically  church 
tasks.  Undoubtedly,  more  men  should  respond 
to  specific  Christian  calls ;  but  when  all  is  said 
the  immense  workaday  tasks  of  the  world  have 
to  be  carried  forward  and  these  are  for  the  ma- 
jority the  chief  sphere  of  Christian  service. 

75 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

One  of  the  self-evident  claims  to  credit  which 
the  human  race  has  established  for  itself  is  the 
faithfulness  with  which  men  go  through  the 
vast  mass  of  daily  drudgery.  Here  is  where 
most  of  us  live.  Here  doing  the  will  of  God 
means  living  in  the  spirit  of  Christ — cheering 
our  fellow-men,  protesting  against  injustice, 
striving  to  make  the  scene  of  daily  work  one 
of  the  mansions  of  the  Father's  house.  Popu- 
lar preaching  must  keep  in  mind  the  daily  ex- 
istence of  the  majority.  The  preacher  is  not 
ministering  just  to  get  hold  of  the  exceptional 
youth  for  some  special  service.  If  he  neglects 
the  exceptional  youth  and  the  possibilities  of 
special  service  he  will  indeed  fall  short  of  his 
full  duty.  The  main  obligation,  however,  is 
with  the  ordinary  man,  to  help  him  see  that 
God  is  a  Companion  and  Friend  and  to  help 
him  walk  in  that  friendship.  Doing  the  will 
of  God  is  for  that  man  just  doing  the  next 
thing  and  the  next  in  the  spirit  of  Christ.  The 
path  is  so  clear  that  the  wayfaring  man  need 
not  make  mistake,  once  he  is  in  the  path. 

Yet  the  simplicity  itself  may  be  deceptive. 
Men  may  lose  sight  of  the  central  importance 
of  the  attitude  of  will  and  take  to  following  the 
strange  gods  of  purely  intellectual  speculation 
or  emotional  thrill.  We  must  insist  that  this 
citadel  of  the  will  is  the  target  of  all  the  preach- 

76 


THE  QUICKENING  OF  THE  WILL 

er'S  effort.  The  preacher  must  make  his  hear- 
ers see  that  after  enough  of  enlightenment  of 
mind  to  enable  them  to  discern  the  Christian 
path,  and  after  enough  of  stir  of  feeling  to 
prompt  to  action,  the  purposeful  resolution  is 
thereafter  the  key  to  all  jjrogress.  We  have 
talked  in  these  addresses  as  if  the  mind  first 
acted,  then  the  feelings  responded,  and  then 
the  will  finally  took  its  stand.  That  has  been 
somewhat  due  to  the  exigencies  of  systematic 
arrangement  and  also  to  the  fact  that  some 
light  of  knowledge  and  some  glow  of  feeling 
are  involved  in  any  action.  Ultimately  the 
high  knowledge  and  the  high  feeling  in  the 
kingdom  of  God  are  built  upon  the  doing  of  the 
will  of  God. 

Have  we  not  often  thought  of  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  parable  of  the  two  housebuilders, 
placed  as  that  parable  is  at  the  conclusion  of 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount?  The  difference  be- 
tween the  two  houses  was  that  one  had  a  foun- 
dation and  the  other  had  not.  One  builder 
had  digged  deep.  By  digging  Jesus  means 
what  he  calls  "doing  the  word,"  and  the  mean- 
ing clearly  is  that  the  plainest  and  simplest  de- 
votion of  the  will  is  the  foundation  on  which  a 
Christian  superstructure — whatever  it  may  be 
— is  to  stand.  Digging  for  the  foundation  is 
the  most  ordinary  labor,  hard  labor.    It  is  the 

77 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

labor  that  we  would  think  anybody  could  do, 
given  the  requisite  physical  strength.  We 
mean  that  it  is  not  the  labor  held  in  especial 
regard  for  skill  or  for  proficiency.  It  is  the 
work  within  reach  of  the  humblest  toiler.  Yet 
the  implication  of  Jesus  is  that  it  is  this  work 
which  is  under  the  building  of  the  house  of 
Christian  wisdom.  The  speech  or  the  thought 
or  the  feeling  may  be  finely  enough  conceived 
and  phrased,  but  if  it  does  not  build  upon  the 
simplest  doing  of  the  will  of  God  it  will  not 
stand  in  the  day  of  storm. 

The  same  implication  runs  through  the  fig- 
ures of  speech  which  Jesus  used.  "Bear  much 
fruit.  ...  So  shall  ye  be  my  disciples."  The 
life  energies  working  at  that  intense  effective- 
ness which  bears  fruit  involve  the  full-orbed 
activity.  Again,  he  said,  "Take  my  yoke  upon 
you  and  learn  of  me:  so  shall  ye  be  my  disci- 
ples." The  figure  of  speech  suggests  once  more 
the  plainest,  simplest  service.  Out  of  this  yoke- 
bearing  would  come  that  understanding  which 
would  mark  discipleship.  Another  expression, 
at  least  by  implication,  teaches  the  same  truth. 
Jesus  told  his  disciples  that  when  men  would 
revile  them  and  persecute  them  and  say  all 
manner  of  evil  against  them  falsely  for  his 
sake,  they  were  to  regard  themselves  as  blessed, 
for  so  had  men  persecuted  the  prophets  before 

78 


THE  QUICKENING  OF  THE  WILL 

them.  Only  action  can  call  forth  the  furious 
opposition  which  shows  itself  in  revilings  and 
persecutions.  When  the  disciples  came  to  the 
action  which  was  positive  enough  to  provoke 
persecution  they  arrived  at  new  and  sym- 
pathetic understanding  of  the  prophets.  Above 
all,  the  surest  path  to  understanding  is  in 
cross-bearing — not  sentimentalizing  about  the 
cross,  or  theorizing  about  it,  but  bearing  the 
cross. 

This  does  not  mean  that  through  doing  the 
will  of  God  the  Christian  will  assuredly  find 
himself  the  possessor  of  a  scheme  of  theology 
or  the  recipient  of  trancelike  visions.  Obedi- 
ence, however,  does  supply  the  data  out  of 
which  theologies  and  insights  are  born.  Bet- 
ter than  a  formal  argument  about  God  is  the 
firm  conviction — based  upon  years  of  attempt 
to  do  God's  will — that  God  is.  Better  than 
any  ecstatic  experience  is  the  alert  insight 
into  spiritual  values  which  grows  out  of  years 
of  faithful  obedience.  When  Amos  came  to 
Israel  to  denounce  wrongdoing  he  exclaimed, 
apparently  with  some  scorn,  that  he  was  neither 
a  prophet  nor  the  son  of  a  prophet.  He  was  no 
doubt  attacking  prophets  for  professionalism. 
He  was  calling  the  people  away  from  the  pro- 
fessionally and  artificially  contrived  message 
and  manufactured  trance  to  simple  obedience 

79 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

to  those  commandments  of  God  which  any 
right-minded  man  ought  to  recognize  as  di- 
vine. We  do  not  disparage  worthy  profession- 
alism— by  which  we  mean  skill  in  helping  peo- 
ple to  do  the  will  of  God — but  no  thought  of 
God  is  of  value  unless  it  comes  out  of  godly 
life,  and  no  feeling  about  God  is  wholesome  or 
sound  which  does  not  spring  out  of  the  at- 
tempt of  the  human  will  to  fit  into  the  divine 
will. 

Professor  Francis  G.  Peabody  once  made  an 
illuminating  comment  on  the  passage,  "I  am 
the  Way,  the  Truth  and  the  Life."  He  declared 
that  whether  intentionally  or  otherwise  the 
order  of  the  Fourth  Gospel's  terms  about  Jesus 
is  significant.  Jesus  is  the  Way.  Walking 
in  the  Way  leads  to  the  Truth.  Out  of  the 
Truth  comes  that  fullness  of  feeling  which  we 
mean  by  Life.  So  when  the  preacher  has 
touched  the  wills  of  men  he  has  made  possible 
the  opening  of  the  mind  and  the  flowering  out 
of  that  feeling  which  is  assurance  and  joy. 


80 


2.  THE  PKEACHER  AS  THE  VOICE  OF 
THE  PEOPLE 


VIII 
PASTOKAL  WORK  AND  PREACHING 

We  have  examined,  all  too  hurriedly,  some 
considerations  which  the  preacher  should  keep 
in  mind  if  he  would  make  his  preaching  popu- 
lar. We  come  now  to  speak  of  the  preacher 
as  uttering  truths  that  have  not  merely  been 
revealed  to  him  as  an  individual,  but  which 
have  been  focused  in  his  consciousness  through 
his  dealing  with  the  people.  There  is  a  sense 
in  which  preaching  can  be  said  to  be  by  the 
people.  The  preacher  is  to  be  the  voice  of  the 
people.  We  do  not  accept  without  qualifica- 
tion the  doctrine  that  the  voice  of  the  people 
is  the  voice  of  God,  but  we  are  searching  for 
whatever  approach  to  the  truth  there  may  be 
in  that  old  adage. 

Before  coming  to  the  center  of  this  theme, 
however,  let  us  linger  for  a  little  over  the  self- 
evident  proposition  that  if  the  preacher  is  to 
be  the  voice  of  the  people  he  must  know  the 
people.  Hence  he  must  give  himself  to  all 
available  studies  which  will  enable  him  to 
know  the  spirit  of  men.  In  his  reading,  ex- 
cept as  he  reads  for  recreation,  he  must  keep 

83 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

closest  to  the  books  which  deal  with  men. 
Many  of  us  read  chiefly  for  the  sake  of  finding 
illustrations,  but  much  more  important  than 
any  illustration  is  the  knowledge  of  human 
life  in  its  fundamental  aspects.  We  may  well 
be  grateful  that  during  the  past  quarter  cen- 
tury so  much  has  been  done  by  scientific 
study  to  make  clear  to  us  more  and  more 
of  the  workings  of  the  human  mind  and  soul. 
The  masses  of  people  have  been  broken  up  into 
groups  for  careful  observation:  there  are  the 
children  and  the  young  and  the  mature  and 
the  old.  We  see  that  the  spiritual  character- 
istics of  these  groups  are  not  just  entertain- 
ingly charming  incidents  of  personal  experi- 
ence, but  revelations  of  human  nature  in  its 
best  possibilities.  How  a  preacher  can  neglect 
the  examinations  of  conversion  in  adolescence 
and  such  researches  as  those  of  William  James 
in  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience  is  a  puz- 
zle. No  matter  who  writes  about  the  soul 
and  its  activities,  the  business  of  the  preacher 
is  to  find  out,  if  he  can,  all  that  has  been  said 
that  points  toward  wisdom  in  dealing  with 
souls.  We  have  come  clearly  to  see  in  our  day 
that  what  we  call  the  laws  of  mind  are  revela- 
tions of  God's  methods  of  doing  just  as  truly 
as  are  the  laws  of  nature.  Every  soul,  indeed, 
comes  into  life  with  the  marks  of  a  distinct 

84 


PASTORAL  WOEK  AND  PREACHING 

difference,  but  so  do  every  flower  and  every 
bird  and  every  beast.    As  like  as  two  peas  in 
a  pod,  we  say,  but  peas  in  a  pod  are  not  alto- 
gether alike.    Unlikenesses  do  not  prevent  the 
operations  of  laws  which  must  be  the  laws  of 
God.    If  the  study  of  individuals  is  important, 
are  not  also  important  all  those  studies  which 
look  toward  the  discovery  of  the  laws  accord- 
ing to  which  men  act,  or  can  act,  when  they 
move  in  groups?    It  will  not  do  to  assume  a 
spiritually    superior    attitude    toward    such 
questions  and  sneer  at  formulas  and  statisti- 
cal tables.     Do  the  formulas  and  tables  con- 
tain any  hints  of  value?    The  scientific  method 
is  just   the   application   of   a   common-sense 
method  over  a  wider  field  than  one  observer 
can  actually  examine  with  his  own  eyes.    If 
there  is  nothing  far-fetched  or  religiously  im- 
pertinent in  asking  why  seven  out  of  ten  con- 
versions in  a  preacher's  own  church  have  oc- 
curred during  the  ages  of  adolescence,  what 
impertinence  is  there  in  asking  why  ten  thou- 
sand conversions  in  a  hundred  churches  have 
occurred  during  the  same  period?     Or  take 
that  other  field  of  psychology  which  has  been 
relatively  neglected — except  as  an  occasional 
novelist  has  dealt  with  it,  perhaps  sensation- 
ally— the  period  of  middle  age  in  men.    Why  is 
it  that  so  many  men  who  have  lived  apparently 

85 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

good  lives  up  to  forty-five  years  of  age  sud- 
denly go  wrong?  Is  it  because  at  that  time 
there  is  likely  to  be  a  disillusionment?  Is  it 
in  middle  age  that  some  men  see  that  there  is 
no  chance  of  the  dreams  of  youth  coming  true? 
Is  it  then  that  men  realize  that  the  success 
they  had  hoped  for  is  not  likely  ever  to  come? 
Does  the  first  chill  at  the  thought  of  old  age 
come  then?  Is  there  then  to  any  degree  a 
physical  basis  for  change  in  character?  If  we 
may  legitimately  ask  this  question  about  five 
men,  what  is  wrong  in  asking  it  about  men  in 
general,  even  if  we  have  to  rely  upon  statisti- 
cal tables  and  charts  and  other  scientific  ap- 
paratus to  get  an  answer? 

We  say  that  the  mark  of  the  man  of  God  is 
an  awareness  of  God,  an  intuitive  discernment 
of  God's  will.  The  preacher  must  be  a  man  of 
God,  but  he  must  be  a  man  of  men  also,  know- 
ing in  himself  how  men  will  feel  and  how  they 
wall  act  in  certain  crises.  Now,  there  are  some 
men  who  seem  to  be  endowed  with  the  aware- 
ness of  God  in  such  manner  that  they  can  be 
said  to  belong  to  a  type  of  religious  genius. 
They  have  by  nature  a  gift  for  awareness  of 
the  Divine.  The  man  who  is  the  safest  guide, 
however,  is  the  man  who  has  attained  to  his 
religious  know^ledge  by  constant  doing  of  the 
will  of  God,  seeking  by  doing  God's  will  to 

86 


PASTORAL  WORK  AND  PREACHING 

come  into  communion  with  God.  So  also  there 
are  men  who  seem  to  have  an  almost  uncanny 
knack  of  understanding  their  fellows.  With- 
out going  beyond  the  four  walls  of  their  own 
houses  they  seem  to  know  what  men  think  and 
what  men  will  do.  Still  even  such  men  are 
likely  to  err  if  they  do  not  mingle  with  men. 
After  having  paid  our  compliments  to  scientific 
knowledge  of  human  nature  which  comes  to 
us  in  the  books  we  must  still  say  that  all  this 
must  be  supplemented  by  the  most  faithful  pas- 
toral work  among  the  people  themselves. 

It  would  seem  that  we  ought  to  do  this,  if 
for  no  other  reason,  for  the  sake  of  getting  a 
hold  on  people  themselves,  adding  whatever 
element  of  personal  power  we  may  to  the  truth 
which  we  are  preaching.  We  all  have  so  much 
to  say  in  the  abstract  about  the  workings  of 
forces  which  move  toward  or  away  from  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  that  we  forget  how  much 
these  forces  take  on  a  personal  form.  It  would 
not  seem  scientific  in  this  day  of  abstract  im- 
personal statement  to  ask  anybody  to  write 
a  thesis  on  the  part  played  even  in  the  might- 
iest historical  and  social  movements  by  per- 
sonal infiuences.  We  are  under  the  spell  of 
those  who  talk  of  the  outworking  of  social  laws, 
predominantly  economic.  If,  nevertheless,  we 
could  get  at  what  moves  people  at  the  time  of 

87 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

crisis,  we  might  have  to  lay  emphasis  on  per- 
sonal influences  at  which  the  abstract  thinker 
would  scoff.  However  it  may  be  in  the  larger 
fields,  it  is  certain  in  the  realm  of  the  preacher 
that  personal  interest  in  men  is  the  surest  road 
to  predispose  them  to  friendly  consideration 
of  the  truth  which  the  preacher  is  set  to  pro- 
claim. How  many  times  the  preacher  of  no 
noteworthy  intellectual  ability  gets  a  better 
hearing  than  his  more  lavishly  endowed  con- 
temporary just  because  he  takes  more  personal 
interest  in  his  people  than  does  his  gifted 
brother!  Especially  if  the  preacher  is  trying 
to  lead  the  thinking  of  his  people  into  new 
paths  does  he  need  their  confidence  in  him- 
self, a  confidence  begotten  by  their  knowing 
him. 

Though  this  is  a  little  aside  from  our  main 
point,  we  must  have  a  further  word  with  those 
who  disparage  pastoral  work.  Understand, 
now,  we  are  thinking  from  the  point  of  view 
of  discerning  what  people  are  holding  in  mind 
about  religious  matters.  How  can  a  man  read 
that  thought  of  the  people  which  must  now 
and  again  be  put  into  expression  for  the  sake 
of  religious  advance  if  he  does  not  move  among 
people?  We  are  not  trying  to  honor  the  hail- 
fellow-well-met  who  thinks  he  understands 
men  because  he  knows  the  name  of  everybody 

88 


PASTORAL  WORK  AND  PREACHING 

in  town,  or  the  brother  who  keeps  count  of  all 
the  doorbells  he  has  rung,  or  the  other  brother 
who  is  always  "dropping  in  to  pass  the  time 
of  day."    We  mean  instead  to  put  in  his  proper 
place  the  devoted  servant  of  the  Kingdom  who 
in  his  desire  to  help  men  is  willing  to  do  an 
amount  of  pastoral  calling  that  yields  no  im- 
mediate return,  for  the  sake  of  seeing  into  the 
mind  that  is  seriously  perplexed  about  reli- 
gious concerns,  or  of  hearing  one  sentence  from 
a  mind  which  has  fought  a  temptation  or  a 
doubt  through  to  victory.    Moreover,  conver- 
sations which  may  not  singly  mean  much  taken 
together  may  reveal  a  mood  or  temper  of  the 
people.     If  a  leading  university  considers  it 
worth  while  to  send  relays  of  students  into 
forests  to  watch  every  hour  of  the  period  of 
incubation  of  birds,  how  much  more  important 
to  give  theological  students  to  realize  that  the 
human  heart  is  understood  only  by  careful  ob- 
servation ! 

If  anyone  cries  out  that  this  is  making  cases 
and  specimens  of  people,  that  the  object  of 
pastoral  work  is  just  to  help  a  man  on  his  own 
account  and  for  his  own  sake,  we  agree  that 
this  is  indeed  the  main  consideration;  but  he 
would  be  a  strange  Christian  who  would  object 
to  having  his  own  experience  utilized  at  least 
indirectly  for  the  phrasing  of  a  statement  cal- 

89 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

culated  to  help  multitudes  of  others.  The  pas- 
toral work  must  inevitably  bear  upon  the 
preaching.  No  one  fit  to  be  in  the  ministry 
will  violate  confidences;  but  does  a  physician 
violate  confidence  when  he  uses  the  knowledge 
gained  in  a  single  case  for  statements  of  law 
or  principle  that  may  save  the  lives  of  hun- 
dreds or  of  thousands? 

To  be  sure,  this  may  damage  the  ordinary 
conception  of  pastoral  work.  It  may  reverse 
that  conception.  Instead  of  making  the  pas- 
toral work  consist  in  talk  by  the  preacher  it 
encourages  free  and  spontaneous  utterance  by 
the  one  on  whom  the  pastor  is  calling.  No 
more  helpful  word  was  ever  spoken  to  me  in 
my  work  as  a  young  minister  than  that  of  an 
older  minister  who  told  me  that  a  good  pastor 
did  not  need  to  be  a  conversationalist  provided 
he  could  be  an  attentive  and  interested  lis- 
tener. The  brilliant  talkers  are  often  among 
the  least  informed.  If  a  pastor  shows  himself 
willing  to  listen,  and  can  listen  without  fidget- 
ing in  a  hurry  to  get  to  the  next  call  on  his  list, 
he  will  be  astonished  to  see  how  thoroughly 
people  will  open  to  him  the  depths  of  their 
lives,  and  how  often  they  will  give  him  a  mes- 
sage which  is  a  genuine  voice  of  humanity. 

A  successful  pastor  once  told  me  of  the  fol- 
lowing experience:    A  member  of  his  church 

90 


PASTORAL  WORK  AND  PREACHING 

suddenly  met  a  terrible  grief.  For  days  the 
stricken  man  sat  almost  in  silence,  but  when 
my  friend  called  on  him  he  was  moved  to  talk 
by  the  rare  sympathy  of  a  skilled  physician  of 
souls,  for  my  friend  possessed  such  rare  sym- 
pathy. The  mourner  talked  for  one  hour,  for 
two,  for  three,  and  found  his  way  toward  the 
light  as  he  himself  talked.  For  the  rest  of  his 
life  he  held  in  grateful  honor  the  memory  of 
the  pastor  who  listened  while  he  talked.  Now 
what  the  mourner  gained  as  he  thus  thought 
aloud  toward  the  light  was  not  less  than  the 
pastor  learned.  The  pastor  heard  not  just  the 
man  talking;  he  heard  the  voice  of  stricken 
humanity  and  a  note  from  that  voice  sounded 
thereafter  from  his  pulpit. 

One  reason  for  encouraging  people  "to  talk 
themselves  clear  out"  is  that  in  the  experiences 
which  are  most  peculiarly  our  own  we  may 
find  ourselves  to  be  most  like  other  people. 
Who  of  us  has  not  had  thoughts  and  feelings 
which  have  seemed  so  peculiarly  his  own  that 
he  has  been  afraid  to  mention  them  to  others 
for  fear  of  being  misunderstood  and  perhaps 
laughed  at?  Yet  who  of  us  has  not  had  the 
experience  of  discovering  that  such  thoughts 
or  feelings  when  actually  expressed  have  been 
those  that  other  people  have  seemed  to  under- 
stand best?    Many  of  these  most  intimate  ex- 

91 


THE  PREACHEK  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

periences  are  most  catholic  in  their  sweep. 
The  man  who  knows  these  peculiarly  personal 
experiences  is  able  to  preach  in  the  widely  hu- 
man terms.  Moreover,  apart  from  all  such  in- 
timacies, the  preacher  w^ho,  with  a  consecrated 
desire  to  serve,  mingles  most  closely  with  his 
fellows  is  the  one  who  can  most  genuinely  utter 
the  voice  which  we  call  the  voice  of  humanity. 


92 


IX 
THE  CONGREGATION  AS  A  FORCE 

All  that  we  have  said  thus  far  could  be  ap- 
plied to  persons  taking  them  one  at  a  time. 
So  far  we  have  been  concerned  chiefly  with 
those  puttings  of  the  truth  which  would  likely 
be  popular  with  what  we  call  the  ordinary  man, 
or  the  man  on  the  street.  We  have  been  inter- 
ested in  the  type  of  preaching  which  would 
make  people  wish  to  hear  it  as  soon  as  they 
heard  about  it.  Now  we  wish  to  speak  for  a 
chapter  or  two  about  the  duty  of  the  preacher 
to  mold  his  group  of  hearers — so  far  as  he  can 
— into  a  unity,  a  force  working  with  him  for 
the  exaltation  of  Christianity's  human  and 
divine  ideals. 

We  are  met  at  the  outset  with  the  old,  old 
objection  that  seems  so  profound,  namely,  that 
a  congregation  is  nothing  apart  from  the  peo- 
ple that  compose  it.  Let  the  congregation  de- 
part one  at  a  time,  and  after  the  last  man 
passes  the  door  there  is  no  congregation  left. 
In  so  far  as  this  is  a  protest  against  mistaking 
merely  nominal  unities  for  realities  we  may 
let  it  stand;  but  what  we  are  thinking  of  is 

93 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

clear  on  a  little  reflection :  that  men  in  groups 
are  different  from  men  as  separate  persons. 
Men  in  groups  think  differently,  they  feel  dif- 
ferently, they  act  differently  than  when  sepa- 
rate. If  it  is  true  that  two  material  particles 
develop  different  powers  when  acting  together 
from  those  which  they  reveal  when  acting 
separately,  why  should  it  be  strange  that  per- 
sons reveal  new  powers  when  acting  together? 
Now  all  we  are  asking  is  that  the  preacher 
keep  in  mind  the  spiritual  force  of  the  congre- 
gation as  a  unity  and  try  to  control  it  for  re- 
ligious purposes. 

We  are  witnessing  to-day  the  development 
of  popular  power  along  a  path  different  from 
that  our  fathers  expected  to  see.  The  older 
thought  of  popular  force  was  that  of  a  huge 
mass  of  human  beings  whose  total  strength 
might  one  day  be  available  for  forward  move- 
ments in  every  direction.  In  certain  respects 
we  still  hold  to  that  ideal,  an  ideal  which  we 
have  before  us  in  our  conception  of  the  public 
opinion  of  a  whole  nation,  for  example;  but 
within  the  mass  of  the  people  we  discern  va- 
rious minor  groups — minor  as  to  size  and  num- 
ber— which  we  must  think  of  as  unities  and 
entities.  Society  as  a  whole  remains  one  mass 
for  some  purposes,  but  for  others  becomes  an 
organism  of  interrelated  groups.     This  has, 

94 


THE  CONGREGATION  AS  A  FORCE 

of  course,  always  been  so.  There  have  been  in 
all  lands  these  voluntary  and  compulsory 
groups,  but  it  is  only  comparatively  recently 
that  the  significance  of  the  groups  has  been 
taken  seriously  enough  by  social  students. 

In  our  thought  it  is  the  business  of  the  min- 
istry to  take  heed  to  the  significance  of  church 
groups  and  make  them  count  for  the  utmost. 
The  master  preachers  have  always  put  their 
stamp  on  their  congregations.  What  we  are 
urging,  however,  is  the  deliberate  recognition 
of  this  possibility  and  of  the  possibility  of  util- 
izing the  inherent  power  of  a  congregation, 
just  by  the  fact  that  it  is  a  congregation,  to 
reenforce  the  strength  of  the  separate  mem- 
bers and  to  reenforce  also  the  power  of  the 
preacher  in  lifting  the  gospel  on  high. 

Suppose  we  look  first  at  the  power  of  the 
congregation  over  its  own  members.  It  is 
quite  the  fashion  to  criticize  any  group  influ- 
ence on  a  member  of  the  group,  especially  any 
religious  influence,  as  "crowd  contagion." 
Let  us  start,  then,  from  crowd  contagion. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  possibility  of 
such  contagion,  and  of  its  perils.  Kespectable 
members  of  a  community  can  be  so  seized  by 
crowd  contagion  as  to  join  in  lynching  riots 
which  they  never  would  have  sanctioned  for  a 
second  if  they  had  been  alone.     I  remember 

95 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

once  seeing  a  religious  assembly — ^in  fact,  an 
assembly  of  preachers,  all  of  them  cultivated 
and  trained — swept  into  a  fury  of  applause, 
approving  the  rebuke  directed  against  a  pre- 
siding officer  whom  they  all  knew  to  be  in 
the  right.  A  sharp  word  of  censure  from  the 
floor  started  the  applause,  which  grew  by  its 
own  intensity  till  the  group  was  almost  fren- 
zied. The  storm  blew  itself  out  in  a  few  min- 
utes and  then  every  man  was  ashamed  of  him- 
self. A  psychologist  has  shown  us  that  the 
communities  in  the  South  which  frequently 
resort  to  horrible  lynching  parties  are  the 
same  communities  which  experience  striking 
and  spectacular  religious  revivals.  Only,  it 
should  always  be  remembered  that  the  revivals 
are  of  the  extravagant  emotional  variety. 

We  fully  admit  the  peril  of  congregational 
force.  But  is  not  the  greatness  of  the  peril 
a  measure  of  the  possibility  of  the  good  which 
can  come  from  the  same  force  wisely  controlled 
and  directed?  The  same  writer  who  points  out 
that  lynching  and  revival  meetings  occur  with 
the  same  group  raises  the  question  as  to 
whether  John  Wesley  did  not  have  almost  a 
hypnotic  ability  to  arouse  intense  emotion  in 
his  audiences.  Would  it  not  be  a  fairer  as- 
sumption that  the  emotionalism  of  early  Meth- 
odism  was  the   contagious   stimulus   of   the 

96 


THE  CONGREGATION  AS  A  FORCE 

crowd  itself,  assembled  together  with  high 
emotional  expectancy,  and  that  Wesley's  power 
was  that  of  controlling  the  crowd  force  for 
lofty  religious  purposes?  At  any  rate  the 
power  was  generated.  Wesley  seems  to  have 
had  his  success  in  canalizing  the  force  and 
setting  it  to  work.  Those  of  us  who  remember 
the  Moody  meetings  know  that  the  size  of  the 
audience  itself,  and  the  expectancy  of  the  au- 
dience, contributed  mightily  to  the  irresisti- 
bility of  the  evangelistic  appeal.  We  do  not 
recall  that  any  lynching  parties  followed 
Moody's  meetings  or  Wesley's. 

The  reference  to  evangelistic  gatherings, 
however,  does  bring  us  close  to  the  danger  of 
crowd  contagion.  Before  discussing  the  con- 
gregational power  as  a  force  for  good  we  are 
anxious  to  be  entirely  fair  in  pointing  out  the 
dangers.  If  a  man  who  is  living  a  selfish  and 
evil  life  is  searching  help  to  make  a  new  start, 
and  the  mass  meeting  by  its  loosing  the  con- 
tagion of  the  mass  spirit  helps  him  toward 
that  start,  well  and  good.  Are  all  contagions 
bad?  Are  we  not  to  judge  contagion  by  what 
one  catches?  Probably  there  is  no  actual  mi- 
crobe that  makes  for  good  health  as  the  pneu- 
monia microbe  makes  for  disease,  but  good 
health  is  contagious  at  least  in  that  we  can 
catch  from  the  healthy  man  something  of  the 

97 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

buoyancy  of  spirit  in  good  health,  which  itself 
tends  to  beget  good  health.  We  admit  that 
the  danger  is  that  in  the  evangelistic  mass 
meeting  a  man's  will  may  be  overborne  and  the 
man  swept  to  a  decision  which  is  not  a  decision. 
The  crowd  has  carried  him  along;  when  the 
crowd  falls  away  he  cannot  stand  alone.  Or 
the  man  may  rely  so  much  on  the  inspiration 
of  the  huge  meeting  that  when  that  disperses 
his  will  relaxes.  Then  the  last  state  is  worse 
than  the  first. 

Having  heeded  the  dangers,  we  may  now 
recognize  the  advantages — the  power  of  the 
congregation  for  good.  Look  at  its  power  to 
quicken  sluggish  minds.  Wise  pedagogy  is 
to-day  insisting  on  the  power  of  the  class  of 
pupils  itself  as  an  aid  in  education.  When  I 
went  to  school  almost  the  only  function  the 
class  itself  served  was  to  supply  punishment 
by  humiliation  in  case  of  public  failure.  The 
presence  of  an  audience  who  could  be  depended 
on  to  laugh  at  a  too  ridiculous  blunder  was  in 
a  measure  an  intellectual  stimulus.  Teachers 
to-day,  however,  feel  that  there  is  a  higher 
function  for  the  class  as  a  class  than  this,  that 
the  part  of  the  class  is  not  fully  played  when 
each  pupil  as  a  separate  individual  has  recited 
in  the  presence  of  the  other  individuals,  each  of 
them  thinking  of  his  own  separate  perform- 

98 


THE  CONGREGATION  AS  A  FORCE 

ance.  So  there  are  being  sought  ways  to  make 
the  spirit  of  the  class  itself  a  quickener  of  all 
the  minds  of  the  class,  ways  of  enkindling  alert- 
ness and  intellectual  expectancy  in  problems 
considered  by  the  class  as  a  class,  sitting  to- 
gether as  a  class. 

However  it  may  be  with  schools,  it  is  evident 
that  a  congregation  can  be  used  to  quicken 
the  minds  of  the  separate  members.  An  alert 
audience  is  one  of  the  best  quickeners  of  men- 
tal force.  The  hearer  prone  to  wandering 
thoughts  finds  his  attention  compelled  by  the 
very  fact  that  five  hundred  others  are  listening. 
If  a  man  who  can  see  nothing  in  the  nobler 
forms  of  music  wishes  to  cultivate  a  taste  for 
such  music,  he  would  best  attend  concerts 
where  such  music  is  rendered.  To  sit  with  hun- 
dreds of  other  people  who  are  listening  will  of 
itself  do  something  to  sharpen  a  dull  under- 
standing. Likewise  statements  which  seem 
tame  enough  if  we  read  them  in  cold  print  glow 
with  life  when  we  hear  them  as  they  are  de- 
livered to  the  congregation.  We  often  remark 
of  such  statements  that  what  is  missing  as  we 
see  them  in  print  is  the  personality  of  the 
preacher.  This  may  be  true,  but  hardly  so 
true  as  that  the  contagion  of  the  audience  is 
also  left  out.  It  is  simply  impossible  for  a  half 
a  thousand  or  more  people  to  listen  intently 

99 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

at  the  same  instant  without  pulling  the  slower 
minds  to  a  speed  which  they  could  not  attain 
by  their  individual  selves.  In  an  earlier  chap- 
ter I  said  that  the  preacher  should  aim  at  the 
average  normal  intelligence  in  his  audience. 
This  needs  to  be  supplemented  by  the  reflec- 
tion that  the  audience  of  listeners  has  power 
by  its  sheer  listening  to  lift  the  average  mind  to 
an  ability  beyond  the  average.  Unfortunately, 
when  all  this  works  the  other  way  and  the  au- 
dience is  listless  or  bored  every  mind  present 
is  depressed  almost  to  a  subnormal  state. 

At  the  risk  of  overillustrating  may  we  say 
that  these  congregational  effects  are  even  more 
notable  when  a  subject  involving  some  play 
of  feeling  is  involved.  Why  is  it  that  we  smile 
or  laugh  aloud  at  utterances  before  an  audience 
that  do  not  seem  particularly  humorous  when 
we  read  them  at  home?  Because  the  audience 
turned  upon  us  its  cooperating  sense  of  humor. 
More  striking  still,  why  is  it  that  we  weep  in 
the  audience  at  passages  that  would  not  beget 
a  sigh  at  home?  Because  we  are  in  an  au- 
dience. 

What  has  all  this  to  do  with  the  preacher? 
Much  every  way.  It  is  the  duty  of  the  preacher 
to  recognize  such  group  forces  and  to  control 
them,  not  to  repress  them  on  the  one  hand  or 
to  allow  them  to  break  in  emotional  storms  or 
100 


THE  CONGREGATION  AS  A  FORCE 

freshets  on  the  other.  Equally  urgent  is  the 
necessity  of  the  preacher's  recognizing  the 
power  of  the  audience  over  himself  and  of  keep- 
ing himself  sensitive  to  the  audience.  We 
have  known  speakers  who  have  said  that  the 
audience  makes  no  difference  to  them,  that 
they  speak  for  the  unfolding  of  their  own 
thoughts  without  regard  to  the  audience.  Such 
men  can  never  be  popular  preachers.  If  there 
is  any  virtue  at  all  in  Paul's  figure  of  the  body 
of  Christ,  the  various  parts  of  the  church  act 
and  react  on  one  another.  The  preacher  is  an 
organ  of  the  Body  of  Christ,  and  an  organ  is 
not  a  self-sufflcient  unity.  An  organ  is  part  of 
an  organism.  He  is  indeed  a  poor  preacher  if 
he  does  not  feel  the  power  of  his  congregation 
quite  as  truly  as  the  congregation  feels  his 
power,  if  his  thought  does  not  take  on  new 
shades  of  meaning  even  to  himself  as  hundreds 
of  people  listen  to  him,  or  if  he  is  not  stirred 
to  better  thought  and  expression  by  the  pres- 
ence of  the  audience  in  front  of  him. 

When  we  say  that  the  preacher  is  to  keep 
himself  sensitive  to  his  audience  we  do  not 
mean  that  he  shall  yield  to  the  audience  in  any 
unworthy  way,  all  of  which  we  shall  try  to  em- 
phasize later;  but  we  do  mean  that  he  shall 
keep  the  congregation  always  before  his 
thought.    He  is  to  serve  them  by  expressing  to 

101 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

them  what  is  noblest  in  themselves,  by  de- 
claring to  the  world  that  Christian  conscious- 
ness a  part  of  which  at  least  is  shaped  by  his 
own  group.  He  is  not  to  allow  any  deadening 
influence  to  steal  into  his  life,  to  allow  the 
channels  for  the  influx  of  spiritual  life  from 
his  people  to  himself  to  become  blocked,  or  the 
mystic  currents  thwarted.  Possibly  one  reason 
why  speakers  who  suffer  from  stage  fright  at 
first  finally  succeed  so  well  is  that  they  are 
unusually  sensitive  to  the  audience.  When 
this  sensitiveness  is  properly  controlled  it 
tends  to  make  the  preacher  a  genuine  voice  of 
the  people. 


102 


THE  MESSAGE  OF  THE  CONGREGATION 

As  we  have  said,  the  preacher  must  be  on 
guard  against  the  wrong  kind  of  sensitiveness 
toward  the  congregation.  This  is  the  sensi- 
tiveness which  is  merely  anxious  to  please,  or 
the  sensitiveness  which  asks  what  the  people 
think  without  inquiring  as  to  whether  that 
thought  is  their  best  thought.  To  step  for  a 
moment  into  another  sphere,  we  may  reason- 
ably say  that  the  difference  between  a  politi- 
cian and  a  statesman  is  that  the  politician 
asks  only  what  the  people  do  as  a  matter  of 
fact  think.  What  they  think  may  be  good  or 
bad.  The  politician  does  not  trouble  himself 
except  at  the  one  point — what  do  the  people 
think?  Having  learned  that,  he  gives  it  voice. 
The  old  story  of  the  politician  who  discovered 
while  making  a  speech  that  he  was  not  at  all 
pleasing  the  crowd  is  in  place.  "Gentlemen," 
he  remarked,  "I  thought  these  were  your  views. 
If  they  are  not,  I  shall  be  pleased  to  advocate 
the  contrary."  The  demagogue  is  the  man  who 
catches  the  people's  thought  and  voices  it  no 
matter  what  it  may  be. 

The  statesman,  on  the  other  hand,  seeks  to 

103 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

give  voice  not  just  to  the  thought  of  the  mo- 
ment, but  to  the  sentiment  of  the  people  at  its 
best  and  highest  reach.  He  looks  always  for 
the  signs  of  these  higher  currents  and  seeks  by 
expression  to  make  them  more  effective  to  the 
mind  of  the  people  themselves.  This  is  no 
easy  task.  There  is  in  the  realm  of  historic 
study  a  conflict  between  those  who  maintain 
something  of  the  old  "great-man"  theory — the 
theory  that  historical  advances  come  from  out- 
standing leaders  who  see  what  ought  to  be 
done  and  bring  it  to  pass — and  those  who  hold 
another  theory  which  claims  that  leaders  are 
of  small  consequence,  that  the  people  them- 
selves make  world-wide  demands  and  that  dis- 
coveries and  inventions  and  philosophies  and 
religions  come  in  response  to  those  demands. 
The  expositors  of  this  theory  claim,  for  ex- 
ample, that  America  would  have  soon  been 
discovered  if  Columbus  had  never  sailed,  that 
the  significance  of  Columbus  was  accidental, 
that  there  was  a  demand  for  a  new  route  to 
the  east  and  some  one  would  have  soon  found 
it.  The  theory  claims  also  that  Luther  was  a 
relatively  insignificant  factor  in  the  Reforma- 
tion. Forces  were  at  work  which  would  have 
brought  the  Reformation  if  Luther  had  never 
lived,  or  even  if  he  had  opposed  the  Reforma- 
tion. 

104 


MESSAGE  OF  THE  CONGREGATION 

Each  of  these  theories  has  its  element  of 
soundness.  Great  movements  do  not  come  un- 
til there  is  a  demand  for  them.  Great  theories 
get  no  chance  until  they  fall  in  with  the  tem- 
per of  a  time.  But  it  requires  a  great  mind  to 
recognize  the  demand  and  to  phrase  it  and  meet 
it.  For  the  demand  of  which  so  much  is  said  is 
at  first  not  articulate.  The  time  may  yearn  after 
something  and  not  know  what  it  is,  or  only 
half  know.  The  people  can  speak  best  two 
words — ^yes  and  no.  They  can  accept  or  reject. 
What  the  people  are  conscious  of  is  a  restless 
impulse,  and  they  know  what  it  is  they  want 
after  it  is  put  before  them.  Now,  to  catch  this 
impulse  in  its  loftiest  phrases  and  to  interpret 
it  to  the  age  itself  requires  genius.  A  man 
may  be  just  a  voice  of  his  time,  but,  after  all, 
there  are  differences  in  voices.  Some  are  true 
and  some  are  false.  Some  are  accurate  and 
some  are  careless,  some  attractive  and  some 
repulsive,  some  stiff  and  some  flexible.  The 
leader  may  indeed  be  only  the  voice  of  his  time, 
but  the  voice  may  indicate  genius  in  itself. 
The  voice  of  autocratic  command  is  indeed 
gone.  We  do  not  believe  in  the  great-man 
theory  that  some  benevolent  intellectual 
despot  is  to  tell  the  people  what  is  good  for 
them,  but  when  the  voice  of  revelation  of  the 
deeper  feeling  of  the  people  themselves  speaks, 

105 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

and  speaks  in  terms  persuasive,  the  people  fol- 
low, their  own  thought  as  thus  uttered  being  a 
guiding  call.  This  requires  of  him  who  is  to 
be  the  voice  the  profoundest  reflection,  the 
deepest  submersion  of  himself  in  the  life  of 
his  time,  the  utmost  loyalty  to  ideals,  the  most 
thorough  training  in  the  power  of  expression 
— attributes  which  we  have  tried  to  insist  upon 
in  these  addresses  thus  far. 

Let  us  look  at  this  more  specifically  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  minister.  He  preaches 
a  sermon  which  seems  to  him  to  present  truth 
in  an  altogether  new  light.  The  people  are  in- 
terested. They  say  after  the  sermon:  "That 
was  fine!  I  never  thought  of  that  before." 
Let  not  the  preacher  feel  too  much  compli- 
mented. It  may  be  that  this  new  thought  is 
one  of  which  the  people  ought  to  think.  It 
may  be  that  the  preacher  should  strive  to  sink 
the  new  conception  deeply  into  the  conscious- 
ness of  his  congregation.  It  may  also  be  that 
the  new  thought  is  bright  and  sparkling,  with 
no  traces  of  lasting  significance  whatever.  If 
the  people  say,  "That  is  something  that  I  have 
thought  of,  or  half- thought  of;  that  is  some- 
thing I  have  wished  someone  to  say,"  the 
chances  are  that  the  preacher  is  on  the  path 
toward  a  message  which  will  be  a  message  of 
the  congregation  itself.    The  old  definition  of 

106 


MESSAGE  OF  THE  CONGREGATION 

oratory  expressed  so  often  by  Gladstone  is  per- 
tinent— that  the  orator  gives  to  the  people  in 
showers  what  he  takes  from  the  people  in  mist 
or  spray.  The  suggestion  is  legitimate  of  a 
mountain  standing  over  against  the  clouds  of 
the  sea  and  condensing  into  running  streams 
what  floats  as  cloud  against  the  mountain 
peak.  This  holds  of  all  forms  of  expression: 
even  art  must  fall  in  with  moods  of  the  people 
which  the  people  may  not  recognize  till  they 
behold  the  artistic  expression. 

As  further  illustration  think  of  the  minister 
in  public  prayer.  When  the  minister  stands 
before  his  audience  to  pray  what  is  he  expected 
to  do?  We  reply,  "To  lead  in  prayer."  What 
is  "leading  in  prayer"?  It  is  not  praying  just 
as  one  would  pray  in  the  silence  of  one's  own 
room  at  home.  I  have  no  right  to  take  my  per- 
sonal perplexities  and  grief  to  the  Lord  in  pub- 
lic prayer,  at  least  not  in  the  language 
of  merely  personal  petition.  There  would 
be  something  shocking  in  a  preacher's  car- 
rying into  petition  in  public  prayer  the 
anguish  of  his  own  soul  over  a  purely 
personal  struggle.  No;  leading  in  prayer 
means  uttering  the  petition  which  the  peo- 
ple would  utter  if  they  could.  The  people 
come  in  tired  after  the  work  of  the  week.  They 
are  refreshed  if  the  preacher  prays  in  such 

107 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

terms  that  they  can  heartily  say  "Amen";  if 
they  seem  to  hear  themselves  praying  in  speech 
they  would  use  if  they  could,  speech  that  is  not 
theirs  by  their  own  utterance  but  theirs  by  im- 
mediate sanction  as  soon  as  they  hear  it.  Paul 
said  the  last  word  on  this  and  kindred  themes 
when  he  gave  advice  to  early  Christians  who 
indulged  in  public  religious  speech  in  an  un- 
known tongue.  When  a  man  speaks  in  an  un- 
known tongue  he  may  edify  himself,  but  how 
can  he  that  sitteth  in  the  seat  of  the  unlearned 
say  "Amen"?  The  masters  in  any  field,  we 
repeat,  are  those  who  have  caught  the  spirit  of 
their  time,  and  have  so  uttered  it  that  it  be- 
comes a  genuine  voice  of  humanity.  The  few 
greatest  books  in  the  world's  treasury  have 
seized  and  said  once  for  all  the  things  forever 
true  of  human  life.  According  to  James  Rus- 
sell Lowell,  the  abiding  significance  of  Cer- 
vantes' Don  Quixote,  for  example,  is  that  it 
sets  forth  in  imperishable  prose  that  conflict 
between  the  ideal  and  the  actual  which  is  the 
perennial  mark  of  man's  struggle.  It  would 
not  detract  from  the  justice  of  this  remark  to 
discover  that  Cervantes  himself  was  not  de- 
liberately dealing  with  any  such  problem.  The 
chief  significance  of  any  man's  work  may  be  a 
quality  of  which  he  himself  is  not  conscious. 
A  congregation  itself  then  may  utter  through 

108 


MESSAGE  OF  THE  CONGREGATION 

the  lips  of  a  preacher  a  distinctive  prophetic 
message.  The  preacher  is  to  recognize  this 
possibility  and  lift  it  to  as  high  a  level  as  may 
be.  The  initiative  toward  a  larger  message 
may  indeed  come  from  the  mind  of  the  congre- 
gation itself  as  the  preacher  learns  that  mind 
by  intimate  personal  contact.  The  force  in 
the  message  too  may  come  from  the  congrega- 
tion, but  the  preacher  must  strive  to  press  into 
the  wine  of  rare  spiritual  speech  the  best 
fruitage  of  the  wisdom  of  his  people. 

The  preacher  must  be  watchful  against  the 
selective  force  of  the  people's  listening.  We 
used  to  have  in  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church  a  homiletic  phenomenon  which  was 
known  as  the  bishop's  sermon.  In  the  old  days 
before  the  present  area  system  was  estab- 
lished the  bishops  of  the  church  traveled  over 
the  whole  denomination  in  their  regular  ad- 
ministration. They  seldom  preached  before 
the  same  congregations  or  the  same  Con- 
ference of  ministers  more  than  three  or  four 
times  in  a  quarter  of  a  century.  The  result 
was  that  the  sermons  which  they  preached 
were  not  more  than  five  or  ten  in  number,  but 
were,  for  the  most  part,  of  unusual  power. 
The  explanation  of  the  certainty  of  the  bishops' 
sermons  to  produce  a  remarkable  efifect  came 
from  the  constantly  excited  selective  power 

109 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

of  audiences.  Very  likely  in  all  unconscious- 
ness the  bishop  was  affected  by  the  fact  that 
the  people  listened  most  intently  to  some  parts 
and  only  indifferently  to  others.  The  attrac- 
tive passages  were  then  more  used  and  elabo- 
rated and  the  unattractive  passages  modified 
or  dropped  out.  On  the  whole,  the  selective 
process  developed  some  poor  preachers  into 
good  ones,  but  it  was  of  benefit  to  the  stronger 
preachers  only  at  the  point  of  delivery.  Anx- 
ious to  make  the  most  of  single  opportunities, 
the  speakers  used  the  sermons  which  would  be 
most  impressive  at  the  moment,  and  the  crea- 
tive, more  prophetic  elements  tended  to  fall 
away. 

The  temptation  does  not  confront  the 
preacher  ministering  to  a  particular  congrega- 
tion in  just  this  form,  but  the  problem  with 
the  long-termed  pastorate  is  often  acute.  It  is 
easy  for  the  preacher  to  see  what  appeals  most 
to  the  attention  of  his  people  and  to  adapt  him- 
self to  that  demand.  This  must  not  be  done  in 
any  subservient  and  acquiescent  spirit.  It  is 
legitimate  in  so  far  as  the  congregation  is 
moving  toward  a  nobler  and  nobler  Christian 
ideal.  Some  congregations  mold  ministers 
outright  and  make  them  better.  Others  make 
them  worse.  The  two  forces  should  act  and  re- 
act— the  force  from  the  pulpit  and  the  force 

110 


MESSAGE  OF  THE  CONGKEGATION 

from  the  pew — for  the  utterance  of  a  message 
which  embodies  the  deepest  sentiment  of  the 
congregation  in  the  best  expression  of  the 
preacher,  until  preacher  and  people  together 
become  a  veritable  organism  within  that  larger 
organism  of  the  church  which  we  call  the  Body 
of  Christ. 

If  we  do  this,  we  give  congregations  each  a 
distinctiveness  which  cannot  be  escaped.  Do 
we  not  thus  depart  from  our  search  for  meth- 
ods to  make  preaching  popular?  We  started 
with  an  emphasis  on  the  appeal  to  the  plain 
man,  the  man  of  the  street,  in  terms  that  he 
could  understand.  In  all  this  stress  on  mak- 
ing a  congregation  distinctive  are  we  not  get- 
ting away  from  the  main  mass  of  the  people? 

If  the  mark  of  distinction  is  something  arti- 
ficial, or  if  it  departs  from  the  underlying  hu- 
man elements  in  religion,  it  is  a  sign  of  widen- 
ing abyss  between  the  church  and  the  people. 
We  regret  to  say  that  there  have  been  churches 
with  such  distinctiveness — churches  known  as 
fashionable  churches,  or  rich  men's  churches, 
or  churches  representing  some  minor  phase  of 
belief,  or  even  some  whim  or  aberration.  Are 
such  churches  to  be  allowed  to  monopolize 
so  good  a  term  as  "distinctive"?  Cannot 
churches  be  distinguished  by  the  force  of  their 
emphasis  on  the  loftiest  or  broadest  phases 
111 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

of  the  gospel?  Can  they  not  be  distinguished 
by  their  hospitality  to  all  comers  and  by  their 
desire  to  make  the  best  they  have  the  property 
of  all  who  will  receive?  The  truths  of  Chris- 
tianity have  as  one  of  their  marks  the  possi- 
bility of  being  shared  with  all  who  will  take 
of  them,  without  impoverishing  but  rather  en- 
riching the  givers.  If  the  best  the  church  has 
is  comfortable  sittings  whose  expensiveness 
makes  them  a  trapping  of  wealth  and  social 
distinction,  such  goods  cannot  well  be  shared 
beyond  a  limited  circle.  If,  on  the  contrary, 
a  church  stands  for  the  best  in  Christianity, 
that  best  can  be  shared.  The  more  common 
the  church  makes  the  truth,  the  more  distinc- 
tive the  church  becomes. 

In  our  first  section  our  thought  was  mainly 
with  the  preacher.  In  this  section  it  has  been 
largely  with  the  congregation.  We  pass  to 
look  at  some  of  the  wider  human  tasks  to 
which  preacher  and  people  should  together  de- 
vote themselves. 


112 


3.     THE  LARGER  HUMAN  VALUES 


XI 

A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

One  of  the  chief  results  of  preacher  and 
congregation  working  together  for  the  coming 
of  the  kingdom  of  Heaven  should  be  the  Chris- 
tianization  of  public  opinion.  We  are  to  deal 
with  some  of  the  more  definitely  social  aspects 
of  the  Kingdom  from  now  on  and  in  this  realm 
public  opinion  is  the  important  factor.  If  one 
were  to  make  a  crusade  to-day  against  evil  in 
industrial  and  social  life  he  would  have  to  call 
attention  to  the  extent  to  which  selfish  forces 
seek  to  control  the  sources  of  public  opinion. 
In  the  earlier  days  when  popular  government 
w^as  in  its  infancy  the  attempt  of  those  selfish 
interests  was  sometimes  to  buy  votes  outright, 
sometimes  to  buy  legislators  or  judges  out- 
right. Such  crude  methods  are  not  much  used 
to-day  except  in  crude  communities.  Instead 
we  have  the  attempt  to  make  or  to  fashion  pub- 
lic opinion  itself,  to  which  legislators  and 
judges  will  have  to  bow.  So  the  work  is  done 
through  press,  or  speech,  or  picture  show. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  stop  long  to  emphasize 
the  force  of  public  sentiment.  We  have  just 
passed  through  a  war  period  in  which  its  might 

115 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

has  been  shown  for  good  and  for  ill.  Those 
who  will  have  it  that  a  conflict  like  the  World 
War  is  merely  a  struggle  between  economic 
forces  forget  that  the  immediate  driving  force 
is  that  of  ideals,  good  or  bad.  Inasmuch  as 
it  is  impossible  to  kill  outright  an  entire  na- 
tion the  attempt  is  to  break  the  spirit  of  that 
nation.  The  ideals  may  be  low  or  high,  but 
through  them  nations  strike  at  one  another. 
Even  the  man  who  says  that  economic  forces 
are  omnipotent  in  human  afifairs  is  always 
talking  about  his  theory.  If  he  were  consistent 
he  would  sit  still  and  let  the  economic  forces 
drive.  His  talking  itself  assumes  that  these 
forces,  blind  as  they  are,  can  be  recognized  and 
controlled.  We  do  not  say  that  it  is  the  truth 
that  sways  people.  We  say  that  it  is  what 
people  think  is  the  truth  that  sways  them. 
Think  of  the  terrible  lengths  that  legislatures 
and  executives  and  courts  went  in  1917-18 
against  those  in  the  United  States  who  were 
suspected  of  not  being  fully  loyal.  The  meth- 
ods by  which  citizens  were  deprived  of  liberties 
without  adequate  cause  will  remain  a  stain  on 
our  history  for  generations.  It  is  not  just, 
however,  to  blame  law-makers,  or  police  or 
judges  for  all  of  this  disgrace.  They  did  their 
own  evil  share,  and  did  it  with  a  vengeance, 
but  the  irresistible  agent  at  work  was  public 
116 


A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

opinion.  If  the  war  of  1917-18  was  a  mighty 
popular  crusade  for  an  ideal  of  popular  sov- 
ereignty— and  in  the  mind  of  the  people  it 
was  certainly  that — it  was  also  a  revelation 
of  the  awfulness  of  the  public  will  in  its  dis- 
regard of  what  had  hitherto  been  proclaimed 
as  right.  In  any  case  there  can  be  no  doubt 
about  the  power  of  the  public  thought. 

Forthwith  we  are  met  by  the  objection  that 
all  this  is  aside  from  the  purpose  of  the  church, 
that  purpose  being  to  get  hold  of  individuals 
and  convert  them  one  at  a  time.  What  this 
legitimately  means  is  that  every  man  is  to 
make  a  decision  for  himself.  Nobody  and  no 
thing  outside  of  himself  can  decide  for  him : 
but  no  power  is  stronger  than  public  opinion 
in  shaping  the  decisions  which  an  individual 
makes.  If  a  decision  is  once  made  no  power 
is  stronger  than  public  opinion  in  helping  to 
keep  or  break  it.  Of  this  more  later,  but  it 
is  interesting  to  hear  men  who  want  mass  meet- 
ings to  help  in  revival  campaigns  protest 
against  our  talking  about  public  sentiment  as 
an  evangelistic  force.  The  world  simply  can- 
not be  evangelized  until  public  opinion  is  cap- 
tured. 

The  first  Christian  duty  in  reference  to  pub- 
lic opinion  is  that  of — upon  proper  occasion — 
defying  it  and  rebuking  it.    Public  sentiment 

117 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

is  manifestly  not  now  Christian,  except  to  a 
very  minor  degree.  That  being  the  case  the 
duty  of  the  church,  when  the  occasion  is  se- 
rious enough,  is  to  challenge  and  rebuke  pub- 
lic opinion.  Happy  that  community  which 
possesses  churches  which  will  stand  behind 
their  preachers  when  the  preachers  in  pro- 
phetic spirit  rebuke  the  controlling  force  of  the 
hour !  How  thrilled  we  all  are  at  the  memory 
of  the  Old  Testament  prophets  and  their  spir- 
itual descendants  of  later  days  who  in  the  name 
of  human  and  divine  ideals  rebuked  kings  even 
at  the  peril  of  their  own  lives.  But  what  was 
the  heroism  of  rebuking  a  king  compared  to 
the  heroism  of  rebuking  the  ruling  force  to-day 
— the  sentiment  of  the  people  themselves !  The 
reach  of  the  king  was  seldom  more  than  physi- 
cal, but  the  outreach  of  the  feeling  of  the 
masses  is  much  more  sure  and  much  more 
deadly.  For  modern  effectiveness  the  prophet 
must  speak  in  the  name  of  a  congregation  or 
larger  group.  One  voice  may  be  easily  stilled, 
but  the  voice  of  a  church  has  a  volume  which 
can  seldom  be  ignored.  We  need  not  only  the 
voice  of  the  prophetic  preacher,  but  that  voice 
reenforced  by  the  thought  and  resolution  of 
the  prophetic  community.  The  preacher  must 
indeed  be  a  voice,  but  not  a  voice  from  the 
empty  air.    He  must  be  the  voice  of  a  body. 

118 


A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

The  question  has  been  raised  in  recent 
months — during  and  since  the  war — as  to  how 
far  the  prophetic  church — preacher  and  peo- 
ple— should  go  in  defiance  of  a  state  decree. 
A  few  years  ago  this  question  would  hardly 
have  been  raised.  Through  centuries  of  living 
together  the  church  and  the  state  had  come  to 
have  pretty  distinct  spheres.  Practically  there 
was  not  much  friction.  In  these  latter  days, 
however,  of  attempt  to  compel  churches  to 
stand  for  all  the  economic  and  social  orthodox- 
ies, when  zealous  but  ill-informed  legislators 
have  taken  it  on  themselves  to  tell  school 
teachers  what  they  shall  teach,  the  churches 
would  do  vv'ell  to  look  closely  to  their  own 
independence.  The  state  may  be  the  voice  of 
all  society  considered  as  a  whole,  but  it  is  not 
necessarily  the  voice  of  God.  Nothing  more 
dreadful  could  happen  to  society  itself  than  for 
the  church  to  condition  its  utterances  upon 
what  society  and  the  state  want  said.  The 
quickest  way  to  make  the  church  utterly  use- 
less is  to  make  it  the  voice  of  a  state  not  yet 
Christianized.  When  the  state  acts  in  a  Chris- 
tian spirit  the  church  may  well  applaud,  but 
never  in  such  fashion  as  to  lead  the  state  to 
feel  that  it  can  always  count  on  church  sup- 
port. We  are  not  now  advocating  anarchy. 
We  are  not  counseling  law-breaking,  but  we 

119 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

are  standing  for  the  church's  right  of  pro- 
phetic utterance  in  criticism  and  rebuke.  Shall 
the  church  allow  this  prophetic  function  to 
pass  to  secular  agents?  It  will  be  remembered 
that  the  best  criticism  of  the  Dred  Scott  de- 
cision came  from  one  outside  the  church — 
from  Abraham  Lincoln — a  criticism  framed  in 
terms  of  respect  to  the  court  and  yet  directed 
at  nothing  short  of  reversal  of  the  decree.  The 
church  is  not  to  counsel  law-breaking — 
though  the  early  Christians  were  not  conspicu- 
ously successful  in  keeping  out  of  jail:  but 
the  church  is  not  to  withhold  criticism  from 
any  institution  or  group  or  individual  who 
blocks  the  road  of  the  kingdom  of  Heaven.  By 
the  way,  a  certain  boldness  in  dealing  with 
public  opinion  is  one  of  the  most  successful 
methods  of  dealing  with  it.  Terrible  as  is  this 
force,  the  church  must  learn  not  to  be  afraid 
of  it  when  it  starts  on  a  wrong  course.  That 
it  is  so  positive  in  its  power  is  a  reason  for 
like  positiveness  in  resisting  it.  This  is  not 
to  preach  any  pose  of  positiveness,  any  theat- 
ric assumption  of  firmness,  but  a  plea  for  the 
force  that  comes  out  of  downright  sincerity  of 
conviction  and  motive  and  method.  An  ad- 
viser of  speakers  seeking  to  influence  public 
opinion  once  said  that  the  secret  of  power  over 
public  opinion  is  earnestness,  that  if  earnest- 
120 


A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

ness  is  not  felt  it  should  be  assumed.  Advice 
like  this  is  abominable.  Earnestness  is  indeed 
the  path  to  success  in  facing  public  opinion : 
but  if  earnestness  is  not  sincere  the  speaker 
should  not  speak.  Here  no  tricks  of  method 
are  permissible.  We  are  proceeding  on  the 
assumption  that  we  are  dealing  with  moral  is- 
sues. There  is  no  use  of  trying  to  deal  with 
moral  issues  immorally. 

In  addition  to  the  control  of  public  opinion 
by  direct  challenge  there  is  the  duty  of  secur- 
ing publicity  for  causes  which  can  be  decided 
only  by  the  people.  We  shall  later  speak  of 
definite  social  problems,  but  let  us  here  men- 
tion just  one  for  the  sake  of  illustration.  We 
refer  to  the  industrial  struggle  which  in  one 
stage  or  another  is  being  experienced  by  every 
people  at  the  present  time.  Who  settles  an  in- 
dustrial question?  Public  opinion.  Both 
sides  of  the  conflict  battle  to  win  public  opin- 
ion. Now  what  is  to  hinder  the  church,  in 
a  particular  crisis,  from  trying  to  learn  what 
the  facts  are  and  to  put  them  before  the  peo- 
ple? Grant  that  the  church  is  not  an  expert 
in  the  detail  of  industrial  processes,  has  not 
the  church  a  right  to  ask  questions  about  the 
human  effect  of  those  processes?  A  steel  man- 
ufacturer recently  gave  it  as  his  opinion  that 
no  one  should  say  anything  about  steel  who 

121 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

did  not  know  the  processes  of  making  steel, 
the  question  having  to  do  with  an  industrial 
dispute  with  thousands  of  workers  in  the  steel 
business.  The  pungent  remark  was  supposed 
to  deal  quite  summarily  with  the  problem  of 
the  twelve-hour  day,  and  deserved  the  retort 
that  manufacturers  should  not  make  com- 
ments on  social  ethics  unless  they  know  some- 
thing about  social  ethics.  No :  the  church  has 
a  right  to  ask  questions  and  to  publish  the  an- 
swers to  those  questions.  All  sides  have  a  right 
to  be  heard,  and  it  is  coming  more  and  more 
to  be  an  offense  against  the  public  itself  when 
any  institution  refuses  to  answer  questions  in- 
volving human  welfare.  It  will  not  do  to  try 
to  meet  this  by  saying  that  the  church  cannot 
understand  technical  processes  and  that  she 
has  no  right  to  inquire  into  trade  secrets. 
There  never  has  been  an  investigation  into  in- 
dustrial welfare  that  has  found  it  necessary 
to  deal  in  any  considerable  degree  with  either 
technical  processes  or  trade  secrets  as  such. 
Any  plain  man,  however,  is  entitled  to  know 
whether  the  technical  processes  work  against 
the  right,  or  whether  the  trade  secrets  are 
harmful  to  men. 

If  the  church  undertakes  propaganda  for 
Christianity  she  must  remember  that  she  is 
dealing  with  the  truth.    She  does  not  have  the 

122 


A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

privilege  of  an  advocate  to  make  out  a  one- 
sidedly  strong  case.  Having  discovered  what 
appears  to  her  as  true,  she  is  entitled  to  push 
that  truth  as  far  as  is  consistent  with  the  truth 
itself.  The  preacl>er  has  no  right  to  misrepre- 
sent or  distort  the  positions  even  of  the  worst 
causes,  but  he  is  under  bonds  to  do  all  he  can  to 
make  the  truth  effective  against  wrong. 

We  need  attack  on  evil  by  the  preacher  in 
the  name  of  the  truth.  We  need  also  the  posi- 
tive forcing  of  evil  and  good  into  the  fullest 
publicity.  This  does  not  mean,  however,  that 
the  prophet  of  the  church  is  to  think  that  he  is 
doing  his  full  duty  as  to  public  opinion  just 
in  attacking  specific  evil  or  urging  specific 
good.  It  is  the  business  of  the  preacher  to  set 
a  standard  and  a  tone  toward  the  vital  reli- 
gious themes  that  affect  the  public  which  will 
prevent  seme  questions  from  ever  being  raised, 
and  which  will  prove  hospitable  to  other  ques- 
tions. Or  the  preacher  must  do  his  part  to 
make  that  social  atmosphere  or  social  climate 
in  which  evil  dies  out  and  good  flourishes.  We 
have  gone  far  enough  in  making  public  senti- 
ment human  to  know  that  some  questions  can- 
not even  be  raised  to-day.  Suppose  a  man 
should  arise  to  preach  the  doctrine  that  all 
murders  should  be  punishable  according  to 
the  worth  of  the  victim  killed.    He  might  make 

123 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

quite  a  show  of  argument  to  prove  that  it  is 
more  of  an  offense  to  kill  a  good  man  than  a 
bad  man,  more  of  an  offense  to  kill  a  useful 
man  than  a  worthless  one,  and  so  on  and  on. 
There  are  endless  possibilities  of  debate  here; 
but  the  social  atmosphere  to-day  would  not 
allow  such  questions  to  be  raised.  When  it 
comes  to  murder  one  life  is  theoretically  as 
much  worthy  of  protection  as  another.  Law- 
yers may  find  a  way  to  introduce  a  practical 
inequality  even  here,  but  the  open  avowal  of 
such  a  purpose  would  not  get  far. 

The  sentiment  of  a  community  is  to  be  won 
for  the  kingdom  of  God.  If  we  can  create  a 
sentiment  friendly  to  good  and  deadly  to  evil 
we  shall  have  supplied  the  prime  requisite  for 
the  coming  of  the  heavenly  kingdom.  As  it  is 
the  moral  climate  is  too  cold,  or  too  dry,  or  too 
blustery  for  the  growth  of  the  finer  flowers  of 
righteousness.  It  might  show  sincere  conse- 
cration to  work  patiently  year  after  year  to 
'  grow  roses  in  the  open  air  of  Greenland,  but 
'  the  effort  could  hardly  deserve  the  highest 
praise  after  all.  Some  virtues  in  this  world 
will  not  get  much  chance  till  the  spiritual  cli- 
mate changes.  We  have  done  creditably  in 
some  elementary  matters,  as  the  murder  illus- 
tration may  suggest.  We  have  not  made  a  be- 
ginning in  others.    In  some  fields  we  have  be- 

124 


A  CHRISTIAN  PUBLIC  OPINION 

gun  to  put  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  into  prac- 
tice, but  in  others  the  first  implications  of  that 
Sermon  are  not  yet  intelligible.  "Love  your 
enemies"  is  hardly  a  doctrine,  for  instance, 
that  patriotic  public  sentiment  would  listen  to, 
unless  indeed  the  skilled  exegete  could  make 
it  clear  that  we  are  to  show  our  love  for  the 
enemy  by  shooting  him  for  his  soul's  good. 


125 


XII 
UNFOLDING  THE   HUMAN  IDEAL 

It  is  incumbent  on  the  Christian  church, 
working  through  its  prophets,  in  an  atmos- 
phere of  increasingly  Christian  public  opinion, 
to  unfold  the  implications  of  the  human  ideal. 
The  prophet  of  God  may  not  always  be  able  to 
tell  men  just  how  to  act  toward  one  another, 
but  he  should  always  set  before  them  the  high- 
est human  ideal  that  they  may  act  in  its  light. 
There  is  an  ideal  of  human  life — in  part  di- 
rectly stated  and  in  part  implied — in  the  Chris- 
tian revelation.  Or  the  ideal  is  like  a  bud 
whose  beauty  and  fruitage  have  not  yet  un- 
folded. The  preacher  must  create  the  atmos- 
phere of  public  opinion  which  will  warm  the 
ideal  into  fullest  expression.  If  the  church 
has  a  rich  conception  of  God  that  conception 
itself  should  carry  increasing  implications  as 
to  the  worth  of  a  man. 

We  may  remark  in  passing  that  in  the  prog- 
ress of  the  centuries  the  ideal  of  manhood  has 
been  expanding,  and  sometimes  without  much 
help  from  the  church.  Leaders  of  opinion  out- 
side of  the  church  have  done  much  to  unfold 

126 


UNFOLDING  THE  HUMAN  IDEAL 

the  meaning  of  an  ideal  human  life.  This  ideal 
has  in  turn  reacted  on  the  conception  of  God. 
As  men  have  found  a  better  idea  of  man  they 
have  demanded  a  better  idea  of  God.  Not  that 
they  have  been  inventing  a  God.  They  have 
not  been  inventing  except  in  the  sense  of  find- 
ing. They  have  thought  of  the  best  ideals  of 
what  man  should  be  as  a  trustworthy  revela- 
tion of  what  God  is.  For  example,  take  the 
extent  to  which  the  responsibilities  attaching 
to  the  human  use  of  power  have  grown.  In 
the  old  days  a  king  could  do  no  wrong.  He  had 
a  divine  right  to  rule.  Just  as  God  could  rule 
unchallenged  over  all  men,  so  the  king — a  vice- 
gerent of  God  on  earth — could  absolutely  sway 
his  group  of  subjects.  The  king  was  respon- 
sible to  no  one  but  God,  and  God  himself  was 
not  responsible  to  any  one.  Both  these  no- 
tions are  gone,  or  fast  going.  Men — often  in 
the  tones  of  wrath — have  challenged  God,  or 
rather  the  doctrines  of  God  in  their  time,  in 
the  name  of  human  rights,  and  have  forced 
into  acceptance  a  better  idea  of  God.  Many  an 
honest  man  would  have  sooner  gone  to  per- 
dition outright  than  to  have  yielded  to  the  mis- 
conception of  divine  sovereignty  preached  a 
few  hundred  years  ago.  Looking  back  through 
the  history  of  the  church,  we  see  that  the  idea 
of  the  God  of  tyranny  and  injustice  has  de- 

127 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

seryed  about  all  the  serious  attack  it  has  re- 
ceived. Men  have  finally  dared  to  believe  the 
best  about  God,  when  once  they  could  believe 
the  best  about  themselves.  They  have  no 
sooner  realized  a  new  moral  obligation  for  man 
than  they  have  dared  put  the  same  obligation 
upon  God.  So  that  the  idea  and  the  ideal  of 
God  have  together  been  made  more  and  more 
moral.  It  is  no  longer  possible  to  preach  a 
God  who  by  his  own  arbitrary  decree  can  make 
good  an  action  Vhich  we  would  condemn  as 
bad  in  men.  We  repeat  that  this  process  of 
moralizing  the  conception  of  God  has  been 
forced  quite  as  much  from  outside  the  church 
as  from  inside. 

This  has  to  be  said  in  all  fairness.  The  neces- 
sity is  now  upon  us,  however,  to  turn  the  proc- 
ess around  and  make  the  ideal  of  God  count 
more  than  before  for  the  unfolding  of  the  ideal 
of  human  life.  If  in  the  name  of  man  we  have 
corrected  our  ideal  of  God,  in  the  name  of  God 
we  must  continuously  elevate  our  ideal  of 
manhood.  We  are  coming  more  and  more  to 
the  ideal  of  the  Christ-like  God.  If  God  is  like 
Christ  then  his  attitude  toward  men  is  like 
Christ's  attitude.  If  we  are  to  be  Christian 
then  our  attitude  toward  men  is  to  be  like 
Christ's.  If  we  insist  that  men  are  to  be 
treated  well  on  their  own  account  and  not  on 

128 


UNFOLDING  THE  HUMAN  IDEAL 

God's  account,  we  reply  that  we  will  not  quib- 
ble over  terms.  We  are  willing  to  say  that  God 
treats  men  as  men  for  w^hat  they  are  on  their 
own  account.  Only,  we  ask  that  the  preacher 
and  church  work  together  to  bring  God  to  men 
as  their  Christlike  Companion  and  Friend. 

The  wrongs  in  Christian  thinking  often  have 
come  out  of  failing  to  get  our  conceptions  thor- 
oughly moral  and  spiritual.  Think  how  often 
the  doctrine  of  human  immortality  has  been 
used  to  hold  men  on  earth  in  a  hard  lot.  Slaves 
have  been  told  that  there  is  another  life  be- 
yond this,  that  this  life  at  best  is  but  a  hand's 
breadth  and  that  the  life  beyond  is  eternal, 
that  those  who  suffer  here  shall  rejoice  there, 
that  the  men  in  dire  bondage  would  much  bet- 
ter direct  their  thoughts  to  future  bliss  than 
to  relief  from  present  woes.  Even  in  this 
twentieth  century  we  have  heard  something 
of  this  doctrine.  A  famous  military  expert 
once  told  me  that  he  wished  the  churches  would 
lay  more  stress  on  immortality  so  that  men 
would  fear  death  less.  Pious  industrial  mag- 
nates are  often  deeply  moved  at  the  failure  of 
the  preachers  to  preach  such  a  gospel  of  the 
other  life  as  will  prevent  industrial  unrest  in 
this  existence.  All  of  which  is  pretty  much 
seen  through  to-day,  the  trouble  being  that 
when  the  application  of  the  doctrine  is  cast 

129 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

aside  the  belief  in  immortality  itself  is  likely 
to  be  abandoned  also.  As  a  legitimate  infer- 
ence, however,  it  is  hard  to  see  how  we  can 
hold  to  the  revelation  of  the  Christlike  God  and 
not  hold  to  human  immortality.  Let  it  be 
freely  admitted  that  there  is  no  scientific  proof 
of  immortality,  and  let  it  be  granted  also  that 
the  philosophical  arguments  for  immortality 
are  all  too  weak  to  stand  the  strain  put  upon 
them.  As  long  as  there  is  no  scientific  dis- 
proof of  the  belief  and  as  long  as  the  argu- 
ments against  it  are  not  conclusive,  we  are 
entitled  to  carry  the  implications  of  the  doc- 
trine of  the  Christlike  God  forward  to  the  be- 
lief in  the  immortality  of  men,  because  of  the 
emphasis  of  Christ  on  the  worth  of  a  man's  life 
in  itself.  If  w^e  can  once  get  preachers  and 
churches  and  social  sentiment  to  view  men  as 
Christ  viewed  them,  and  then  to  ask  always, 
"Ought  a  man  to  be  treated  thus  or  thus?"  we 
would  speedily  unfold  the  idea  of  man  into 
practical  consequences  which  would  put  us  on 
the  path  to  the  elimination  of  many  a  social 
abuse. 

In  a  word :  if  we  believe  in  the  God  of  Christ, 
our  thought  of  men  must  be  that  men  are  ends 
in  themselves  and  not  instruments,  or  tools; 
at  least  the  emphasis  is  to  be  on  the  end-in-itself 
ideal  of  manhood.    A  man  may  indeed  be  a  fine 

130 


UNFOLDING  THE  HUMAN  IDEAL 

instrument  for  the  accomplishment  of  a  splen- 
did purpose.  It  is  well  when  we  recognize 
and  honor  this  fitness.  Noble  is  the  privilege 
of  a  man  himself  to  take  himself  as  an  instru- 
ment and  to  pride  himself  on  keeping  fit  for 
the  fulfillment  of  the  work  which  he  can  so 
royally  perform.  We  are  not  saying  that  the 
individual  man  should  take  himself  as  an  end 
for  himself.  He  "^dll  better  attain  to  excellence 
on  his  own  account  if  he  works  for  the  success 
of  some  cause  outside  himself.  This  view, 
however,  which  I  may  justly  take  of  myself 
becomes  a  pestilent  heresy  when  I  take  it  con- 
cerning my  neighbor,  and  begin  to  treat  him 
as  if  he  were  an  instrument  or  a  tool.  Even  if 
he  were  an  instrument  of  the  loftiest  artistic 
fineness — for  example,  if  he  had  a  surpassing 
voice  for  singing — he  would  have  a  right  to 
feel  aggrieved  if  men  spoke  of  him  just  as  a 
musical  instrument.  If  he  were  of  the  surest 
artistic  genius,  he  would  crave  to  have  hear- 
ers discern  and  appreciate  the  personality 
sounding  through  the  voice. 

We  must  recognize  the  claim  of  men  to  self- 
expression.  One  charmed  word  in  all  our  edu- 
cational theorizing  to-day  is  service,  but  the 
service  shows  itself  largely  in  helping  men  to 
self-expression.  Men  are  ends-in-themselves. 
They  must  be  helped  to  self-expression.    Now,. 

131 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

while  it  would  be  absurd  to  try  to  eliminate  tlie 
thought  of  men  as  instruments  altogether,  it 
must  be  insisted  upon  that  whatever  doctrine 
or  practice  gets  the  emphasis,  conscious  or  un- 
conscious, on  such  instrumentalism  into  the 
first  place  is  not  Christian  if  we  are  to  think 
of  God  as  like  Christ.  Jesus  made  his  con- 
tribution to  human  welfare  not  especially  in 
specific  rules  governing  human  conduct  but 
in  the  general  principles  which  he  held  and 
acted  upon  as  to  the  worth  of  a  man  in  himself, 
and  in  the  lengths  of  living  and  dying  to  which 
he  went  to  sink  that  thought  into  the  common 
consciousness.  The  assumptions  on  which 
Jesus  wrought  were  sometimes  more  important 
than  his  direct  utterances.  What  is  the  de- 
cisive argument  against  human  slavery?  Let 
us  speak  of  Negro  slavery  simply  because  that 
was  the  form  of  slavery  which  called  forth  the 
most  laboriously  reasoned  defenses.  The  de- 
cisive argument  against  slavery  was  not  that 
the  Negro  was  badly  treated,  U7icle  Tom's 
Cabin  to  the  contrary,  unimpeachable  as  the 
powerful  book  of  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe  no 
doubt  was  in  particular  instances.  The  de- 
cisive argument  was  not  economic,  evident 
though  it  was  that  slavery  was  ruinously 
expensive.  On  the  other  hand,  a  good  deal 
could  honestly  be  made  out  of  the  pleas  that 

132 


UNFOLDING  THE  HUMAN  IDEAL 

the  Negro  had  more  chance  in  America  than 
in  Africa,  that  he  could  work  in  a  hot  climate 
better  than  a  white  man,  that  the  production 
of  cotton  was  essential  to  the  world's  life,  that 
the  Negro  could  not  be  regarded  as  in  the  same 
scale  of  development  as  the  white  man,  that 
slavery  had  held  a  place  in  human  history  as 
long  as  there  had  been  a  history.  Nevertheless, 
the  whole  problem  ceased  after  a  while  to  be  a 
theme  for  formal  argument  and  the  battle 
passed  into  the  realm  of  ideals,  the  decisive 
question  being  whether  one  man  should  be 
compelled  to  serve  as  the  slave  of  another  man. 
The  offense  in  slavery  was  against  the  ideal 
of  what  a  man  should  be.  There  was  no  logical 
device  that  could  fit  slavery  into  consistency 
with  the  advocacy  of  a  Christly  human  ideal. 

As  Christianity  would  attack  slavery  to-day 
as  a  sin  against  the  human  ideal,  so  it  must 
wage  war  on  all  persons  and  institutions  that 
would  treat  men  as  other  than  men.  Nobody 
can  to-day  sit  down  and  draw  out  fully  the  im- 
plications of  a  man's  being  essentially  a  son 
of  the  God  of  Christ,  but  some  implications  are 
unmistakable  even  if  they  must  be  rather  nega- 
tively stated.  The  general  statement  that  a 
man  should  not  be  treated  other  than  as  a  man 
itself  carries  us  pretty  far.  How  far?  Well, 
far  enough  for  us  to  see  that  in  industry  men 

133 


THE  PEEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

should  not  be  viewed  predominantly  as  ma- 
chines, for  one  thing.  Some  phases  of  machine- 
like activity  men  must  always  go  through,  for 
the  body  of  a  man  is  a  machine.  If,  though, 
there  is  to  be  such  work,  it  must  not  consume 
too  many  hours  of  the  day.  The  worker  must 
not  be  so  wearied  at  the  end  of  the  day  that  the 
more  human  capacities  of  his  nature  get  no 
chance.  The  day  must  not  be  too  long.  In 
some  respects  man  is  an  animal,  but  that  does 
not  warrant  our  treating  him  like  a  beast  of 
burden  in  work  hours,  or  compelling  him 
to  live  like  an  animal  out  of  work  hours  by 
giving  him  so  scanty  a  wage  that  only  the 
grosser  animal  needs  are  met.  A  leader  in 
industry  recently  declared  his  opinion  that 
there  should  be  no  objection  to  single  men  in 
industry  living  in  any  conditions  they  choose. 
The  Christian  has  an  objection  to  any  system 
that  houses  any  men  in  tenements  or  boarding 
houses  with  such  crowding  as  to  make  the  sur- 
roundings animal  rather  than  human.  The 
Christian  objects  to  terms  like  "labor  mar- 
kets," or  "labor  commodity,''  or  "hands"  in  so 
far  as  these  carry  any  implications  against  full 
human  worth.  Moreover,  the  day  is  coming, 
and  coming  fast,  when  in  the  name  of  a  human 
ideal,  with  that  ideal  reenforced  in  the  name 
of  the  Christlike  God,  the  church  will  insist  on 

134 


UNFOLDING  THE  HUMAN  IDEAL 

dealing  with  the  question  as  to  whether  we  can 
lay  hold  on  the  youngest  and  best  brains  of  a 
nation  and  blow  those  brains  into  the  mud  for 
any  nationalistic  or  imperialistic  or  economic 
ambition  whatsoever. 

When  these  more  elementary  requirements 
have  been  met  the  weightier  questions  as  to 
how  so  to  treat  a  man  as  to  encourage  his 
larger,  more  positive  freedom  will  be  upon  us. 
There  is  a  liberty  due  the  sons  of  God,  because 
God  is  Christlike  and  because  he  values  men 
on  their  own  account.  That  liberty  the  church 
should  follow  whithersoever  it  leads. 


135 


XIII 

THE  EXPANSION  OF  THE  MOEAL 
SPHERE 

We  often  hear  it  said  that  a  live  church 
must  be  an  expanding  church ;  that  expansion 
is  the  law  even  of  institutional  life ;  that  if  a 
church  is  content  to  hold  its  own  and  not  to 
move  forward  to  conquest,  it  is  in  the  way  of 
death.  All  of  which  is  manifestly  sound,  but 
we  must  be  careful  not  to  interpret  expansion 
narrowly.  Too  often  we  think  of  new  build- 
ings and  increased  membership  and  enlarging 
varieties  of  technically  religious  projects  as 
the  significant  expansion.  All  these  marks  of 
growth  have  their  healthy  meaning,  but  for 
the  profoundest  influence  of  the  church  in  the 
world  we  must  think  of  a  definitely  moral  ex- 
pansion, or  of  what  moral  expansion  involves 
in  our  world  of  people. 

First,  we  must  bring  more  and  more  of  our 
acts  in  relation  to  people  under  the  Christian 
law  of  good  will.  The  law  of  good  will  is  al- 
ways broadening  in  its  applications  if  it  is  a 
living  force.  The  moral  life  began  with  nar- 
row codes,  possibly  because  men  touched  one 
another  in  so  few  relationships.    As  more  and 

136 


EXPANSION  OF  THE  MOKAL  SPHERE 

more  actions  were  seen  to  have  a  moral  bear- 
ing these  were  taken  into  the  moral  sphere. 
We  have  seen  some  phases  of  this  growth  be- 
fore our  own  eyes.     In  the  boyhood  of  men 
now  living  the  liquor  traffic  was  not  thought 
to  be  especially  deadly  to  society.     As  men 
have  pressed  closer  and  closer  together  in  more 
intimately  related  activities  the  harmful  re- 
sults of  this  form  of  social  evil  have  become 
only  too  apparent.     In  a  small  village  many 
things  might  not  be  adjudged  evil  which  might 
carry  fearful  possibilities  in  a  city.    To  open 
a  well  on  a  farm  might  be  necessary  and  hos- 
pitable.    Like  action  might  fitly  be  regarded 
as  a  crime  in  a  city.    There  is  inevitably  a  rela- 
tive element  in  the  moral  life.    It  is  our  task 
to  take  more  and  more  of  our  acts  under  the 
guidance  of  Christian  conscience  as  we  see  the 
social  consequences  of  these  acts.    Those  who 
want  an  absolute  system  of  ethics  preached  at 
all  times  might  just  as  well  learn  that  there  is 
no  such  system,  except  in  that  the  moral  spirit 
is  absolutely  binding.    Now,  the  relativity  of 
ethics  in  this  social  sense  is  a  severer  burden 
on  conscience  than  any  absolute  code  could  be. 
If  we  had  an  absolute  code,  we  could  learn  it 
once  for  all.    As  things  are  we  have  to  keep  our 
morality  up  to  date  by  the  sternest  effort.    No 
task  in  Christian  conscience  is  heavier  than 

137 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

this  of  making  all  our  acts  toward  our  fellows 
square  with  the  law  of  Christian  good  will. 
Second,  if  Christian  social  morality  is  to 
live,  it  must  bring  more  and  more  persons 
within  the  law  of  good  will.  To-day  this  prob- 
lem is  not  to  be  settled  by  adding  new  lists  of 
individual  persons  to  those  whom  we  are  to 
treat  with  good  will.  Social  contacts  to-day 
are  not  always  immediately  personal.  A  man 
is  not  to  be  judged  by  the  number  of  separate 
persons  he  treats  with  kindliness.  We  touch 
men  through  institutions  like  business,  like  the 
vote,  like  the  public  sentiment  that  goes  out 
from  us  to  mold  the  lives  of  men.  It  is  much 
more  important  that  we  have  established  laws 
of  good  will  by  which  we  reach  groups  of  men 
than  that  we  should  have  a  widening  circle  of 
particular  individuals  whom  we  personally 
treat  kindly.  There  is  a  chance  of  confusion 
here.  It  often  happens  that  men  whose  main 
conduct  is  socially  harmful  are  most  delight- 
ful personally  to  increasing  numbers  of  per- 
sons. I  know  a  man  of  positive  industrial 
genius  who  delights  to  bring  an  increasing 
number  of  persons  under  his  benevolent  kindli- 
ness. He  is  altogether  charming  in  this  be- 
nevolence, having  the  rare  art  of  bestowing  fa- 
vors without  treading  upon  the  self-respect  of 
the  one  favored.    He  would  not  harm  a  hair  of 

138 


EXPANSION  OF  THE  MOEAL  SPHERE 

the  head  of  any  one  purposely.  Yet  the  man's 
industrial  activities  are  carried  on  by  plans 
outdated  in  communities  which  lay  stress  on 
the  human  values.  There  is  no  question  as  to 
personal  sincerity.  The  difficulty  is  that  this 
man  substitutes  good  will  toward  persons 
in  a  personal  relationship  for  good  will 
worked  out  into  the  more  inclusive  general 
relationship.  I  have  known  officials  with 
appointing  authority  even  in  churches  who 
could  be  depended  on  to  treat  with  the 
most  gracious  courtesy  increasing  numbers  of 
personal  acquaintances,  and  who  could  be  de- 
pended on  also  to  treat  unjustly  those  outside 
that  circle,  not  through  intention  but  through 
sheer  obliviousness.  In  the  long  run,  if  any- 
thing has  to  be  sacrificed,  let  the  personal  de- 
lightfulness  be  sacrificed  if  thereby  men  out- 
side the  charmed  circle  get  a  better  chance  for 
justice.  To  drop  into  the  realm  of  sport  for 
an  instant,  is  it  not  a  wise  provision  in  base- 
ball rules — human  nature  being  what  it  is — 
that  the  umpires  are  not  encouraged  by  the 
traditions  of  the  sport  to  mingle  freely  with 
the  players  in  social  relationships?  For  the 
sake  of  being  friendly  to  a  few  it  is  not  per- 
missible to  run  the  risk  of  being  unfair  to  any- 
body. What  we  are  seeking  as  Christians  is  a 
law  of  good  will  which  will  include  everybody. 
139 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

All  this  seems  in  contradiction  to  what  we 
have  previously  said  about  seeking  out  per- 
sons as  individuals,  but  the  contradiction  is 
only  in  the  seeming.  We  are  protesting  against 
even  the  beginning  of  anything  that  makes  for 
favoritism,  for  privileged  groups,  for  personal 
pulls.  My  illustrations  may  be  unfortunate 
as  suggesting  that  one  may  not  even  have  one's 
personal  friendships.  No  such  implication  is 
intended,  but  what  is  intended  is  the  preaching 
of  a  doctrine  of  human  contacts  which  will 
prevent  specialized  devotion  to  a  select  list 
from  overlooking  the  justice  due  a  wider  circle, 
or  due  anybody. 

This  brings  us  to  a  third  reflection  which 
may  seem  still  further  in  contradiction  to  what 
has  gone  before — the  possible  expansion  of  the 
application  of  good  will  through  attention  to 
good  manners.  We  use  the  term  broadly  not 
as  a  fussing  with  details  of  etiquette.  We  are 
not  about  to  maintain  that  any  portentous  so- 
cial consequences  will  follow  getting  the  knives 
or  the  forks  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  plate. 
Social  life  is,  however,  more  and  more  the  sci- 
ence and  art  of  living  together.  We  must  see 
that  even  in  personal  contacts  a  thorough  re- 
gard for  the  other  man  as  a  person  ought  to 
impel  us  to  treat  that  other  man  with  a  good 
will  which  shows  itself  in  every  reasonable 

140 


EXPANSION  OF  THE  MORAL  SPHERE 

consideration  toward  him,  whether  he  particu- 
larly deserves  such  consideration  or  not.  The 
wider  bearings  of  the  problem  of  manners  ap- 
pear when  men  begin  to  assume  an  attitude  of 
superiority  toward  those  of  alleged  social  or 
national  or  racial  inferiority.  When  we  are 
searching  for  causes  of  social  and  interna- 
tional and  racial  unrest  let  us  not  leave  bad 
manners  out  of  the  reckoning.  Think  of  the 
Easter  parades  in  some  of  our  cities.  No,  dear 
reader  from  outside  the  city,  the  Easter  parade 
does  not  quite  mean  a  procession  of  worship- 
ers marching  and  singing  in  gratitude  at  the 
resurrection  of  our  Lord.  It  means  the  after- 
church — or  before-church — display  of  hats  and 
gowns  and  motor  cars.  It  is  the  parade  in 
which  those  who  have  make  clear  to  the  have- 
nots  their  understanding  of  the  beatitude  that 
blessed  are  the  meek,  for  they  shall  inherit  the 
earth.  All  this  is  socially  wrong.  For  the 
Fifth  Avenues  of  most  cities  are  too  near  the 
East  Sides,  and  the  dweller  on  the  East  Side 
sees  a  flaunting  of  wealth  on  Fifth  Avenue 
which  fires  him  with  wrath,  a  wrath  that  may 
not  die  out  till  it  has  burned  too  far.  Material 
display  is  sheer  vulgarity  and  bad  manners, 
and  the  trouble  is  that  display  is  at  least  un- 
consciously aimed  at  conveying  a  broad  hint  of 
superiority. 

141 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

In  the  field  of  international  and  racial  con- 
tacts what  we  call  in  the  terminology  of  the 
day  "gestures"  are  quite  important,  and  ges- 
tures belong  often  in  the  realm  of  manners. 
The  extreme  courtesy  in  the  correspondence 
between  nations  which  regard  one  another  as 
equals  is  commendable,  but  the  peremptori- 
ness  of  the  notes  of  big  nations  to  little  nations 
leaves  much  to  be  desired.  As  a  single  illus- 
tration, the  communications  of  the  United 
States  with  the  Latin- American  states  violate 
now  and  again  all  the  canons  of  good  taste. 
Mexico  has  trespassed  upon  the  patience  of  the 
United  States  to  an  almost  intolerable  degree 
and  the  United  States  has  been  a  model  of 
tolerance  in  its  own  eyes,  but  the  of&cial  com- 
munications of  the  United  States  have  for 
years  been  brusque  and  impertinent  and  boor- 
ish, and  the  temper  of  a  public  opinion  which 
has  at  bottom  no  desire  for  war  with  Mexico 
has  nevertheless  been  so  testy  as  to  provoke 
war  spirit  on  both  sides  of  the  Rio  Grande. 
International  bad  manners  may  not  be  the  su- 
preme cause  of  wars,  but  even  if  we  concede 
to  the  economist  that  most  wars  come  out  of 
scrambles  for  world  markets  and  for  physical 
existence,  let  it  be  remembered  that  even  such 
admittedly  mighty  economic  forces  could  not 
drive  the  nations  at  one  another's  throats  if  it 

142 


EXPANSION  OF  THE  MOKAL  SPHERE 

were  not  for  the  vulgarity  and  bad  manners 
which  so  abound  in  jingoistic  patriotism — a 
patriotism  the  reverse  of  Christian. 

This  leads  on  to  another  point,  the  duty  of 
carrying  the  ideal  of  Christian  morality  into 
all  the  methods  which  mark  the  contacts  of 
groups.  In  private  personal  life  we  have  won 
the  notable  victory  of  securing  practically  gen- 
eral consent  that  methods  must  be  in  them- 
selves moral.  The  end  does  not  necessarily 
justify  the  means.  We  ask  concerning  a  man's 
personal  success  as  to  how  he  entered  into  the 
success,  whether  by  the  open  door  of  honesty, 
or  whether  he  climbed  up  some  other  way. 
Unfortunately,  there  is  not  yet  agreement  that 
some  current  methods  of  intercourse  between 
groups  are  in  themselves  wrong.  Most  dis- 
tinguished thinkers  preach  to  us  that  in  the 
larger  social  contacts  a  frankly  utilitarian 
ethics — the  greatest  material  good  of  the  great- 
est number — is  the  best  theory  and  that  the 
method  is  to  be  judged  by  its  success  in  bring- 
ing about  this  greatest  good.  This  may  be 
allowable  as  practical  rule  of  thumb,  but  it 
unlocks  the  gate  to  troops  of  evils:  war  upon 
and  exploitation  of  weaker  peoples  by  stronger 
fits  in  remarkably  well  with  a  frankly  utili- 
tarian theory.  Sins  against  essential  human- 
ity are  nevertheless  sins  even  if  they  do  for  the 

143 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

moment  bring  about  the  material  greatest  good 
of  the  greatest  number. 

Finally,  another  arena  of  conquest  for 
Christian  morals  is  the  emphasis  on  the  neces- 
sity of  the  hardest  kind  of  hard  thinking  in  the 
solution  of  the  moral  problems.  Ethics  is 
neither  wholly  intuitive  nor  wholly  utilitarian ; 
the  feeling  of  good  will  ought  to  be  absolute, 
but  the  actual  expression  of  good  will  is  a 
task  for  sternest  thought.  We  have  reached 
the  height  where  we  know  that  we  owe  good 
will  to  our  fellow  men  without  stopping  to 
think  about  it.  To  debate  whether  we  owe  a 
man  good  will  or  not  would  argue  a  belated 
moral  insight.  Just  what  to  do,  however,  in 
a  particular  moral  situation  may  require  all 
the  thinking  power  we  possess.  So  that  there 
is  need  for  the  finest  spirit  of  thoughtfulness 
by  Christian  people.  It  is  not  expected  that 
the  Christian  shall  himself  be  a  technical  ex- 
pert in  difficult  moral  situations  which  require 
an  expert,  but  it  is  not  to  be  expected  that  he 
shall  lapse  into  unthinking  silence  just  because 
he  cannot  give  expert  advice.  One  of  the  tricks 
that  social  reactionaries  often  employ  to  brow- 
beat the  reformer  is  to  ask  him  to  suggest  a 
solution  to  the  difficulty  about  which  he  com- 
plains. Thus  overridden  because  he  does  not 
know  what  to  say,  the  reformer  ceases  to  cry 

144 


EXPANSION  OF  THE  MORAL  SPHERE 

out.  Therein  he  is  wrong.  He  is  to  insist  upon 
the  duty  of  the  man  in  the  industry  to  supply 
the  solution,  or  to  find  the  expert  who  can. 

But  we  are  not  thinking  primarily  of  ex- 
perts. We  have  in  mind  the  necessity  of  the 
Christian's  being  alert  and  open-eyed  to  situa- 
tions about  him,  of  his  supplying  that  thought- 
fulness  which  slows  down  social  movements 
when  they  are  running  too  fast  toward  the 
unthinking  reactionary  or  to  the  unthinking 
radical,  the  thoughtfulness  which  starts 
morally  progressive  campaigns  when  society 
becomes  morally  inert.  We  are  not  now  speak- 
ing of  the  technical  expert,  but  of  the  thought- 
ful citizen,  who  sees  and  recognizes  the  public 
ills  which  ordinary  intelligence  can  cure,  who 
patiently  seeks  for  the  remedies  for  such  diffi- 
culties, and  who  calls  for  the  expert  when  the 
expert  is  needed,  all  with  the  utmost  tolerance 
which  the  urgency  of  the  case  will  permit.  The 
Christian  should  not  ignore  the  command  to 
love  his  God  with  the  mind. 


145 


XIV 

THE  CHUKCH  AND  THE  SOCIAL 
IMAGINATION 

The  imagination  has  always  been  regarded 
as  the  mental  power  especially  adapted  to  be 
the  organ  of  religious  revelation.  All  our  pic- 
tures of  immortal  life  are  in  terms  of  imagina- 
tion, from  the  book  of  Revelation  on  down  to 
the  sermon  of  last  Sunday  on  "Heaven."  Here 
the  imagination  has  free,  though  entirely  le- 
gitimate, rein.  The  picturings  which  we  paint 
of  eternal  life  are  probably  nearer  the  truth 
than  our  abstract  philosophizings.  Another 
lawful  privilege  for  the  Christian  imagina- 
tion is  to  make  the  scriptural  story  live  again. 
Here  there  is,  indeed,  a  fact  basis  which  must 
always  be  observed,  but  the  Bible,  set  before 
us  as  it  is  to-day  by  exact  scientific  study,  can 
only  be  made  alive  by  touching  it  with  the  fire 
of  a  vivid  imagination.  Indeed,  the  recon- 
struction by  scientific  study  was  itself  due  to 
the  exercise  of  that  wonderful  force  of  antici- 
pation leading  to  discovery  which  we  call  the 
scientific  imagination.  No  scientist  finds  any- 
thing by  just  staring  about.  He  knows  what  he 
is  looking  for  before  he  begins  to  look. 

146 


SOCIAL  IMAGINATION 

More  imperative  than  any  of  these  exercises 
of  imagination,  however,  is  that  of  the  social 
imagination,  by  which  we  mean  the  power  of 
putting  ourselves  in  the  place  of  others  and 
of  looking  at  life  from  their  standpoint,  the 
power  of  making  present  to  ourselves  the  work- 
ing of  forces  which  we  cannot  actually  see.  It 
is  hard  to  comprehend  how  the  law  of  good 
will  as  set  before  us  by  Jesus  can  ever  be  made 
effective  except  by  the  use  of  imagination. 
People  and  preachers  together  are  engaged  in 
a  regal  task  when  they  grasp  this  marvelous 
power  as  an  instrument  for  actually  bringing 
in  the  kingdom  of  God  on  earth. 

Let  me  start  with  a  simple  application — 
that  of  trying  to  make  real  to  myself  the  out- 
reach of  the  social  forces  which  proceed  from 
me  every  day.  There  is  a  fine,  though  now 
trite,  appeal  to  the  imagination  in  the  exhorta- 
tion to  us  to  heed  for  a  moment  the  number  of 
unseen  servants  who  wait  upon  us  at  break- 
fast: the  farm-laborer  who  plants  and  reaps 
the  wheat  in  Montana,  the  coffee-grower  in 
Brazil,  the  sugar-planter  in  the  West  or  in 
Cuba,  the  dairy-keeper,  the  cotton-raiser,  and 
so  on  through  an  ever-lengthening  line.  Surely, 
the  ends  of  the  earth  reach  toward  the  hum- 
blest breakfast  table.  Now,  let  the  breakfast- 
ing Christian  reverse  the  process  and  ask  him- 

147 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

self  about  the  outreach  of  his  own  life.    If  he 
is  a  worker  in  a  factory,  his  work  too  goes  to 
the  ends  of  the  earth ;  if  he  is  an  employer  of 
laborers,  his  life  is  an  important  factor  in  their 
daily  toil  even  though  he  may  never  see  them. 
It  is  always  refreshing  to  hear  an  employer  of 
laborers  talk  about  the  necessity  of  the  work- 
ingmen's  being  superior  to  their  environment 
when  that  employer  himself  is  the  largest  force 
in    the   environment  of   his   own   employees. 
When  his  laborers  try  to  rise  superior  to  him- 
self he  is  likely  to  change  his  tune  to  something 
about  Bolshevism.     Let  the  Christian  at  the 
breakfast  table  take  a   few   coins   from   his 
pocket  and  ask  where  his  money  came  from. 
How  far  was  that  which  came  from  specula- 
tion earned?    How  far  was  that  which  came 
from  profits  earned?    Is  there  a  toiler  standing 
at  a  machine  somewhere  who  earned  the  profits 
which  have  somehow  got  into  the  pocketbook  of 
the  wrong  man?    Personally,  I  am  quite  or- 
thodox in  political  economy,  but  I  must  admit 
that  these  queries  are  disquieting.    It  is  part 
of  the  business  of  the  Christian  Church  and  the 
Christian  preacher  to  raise  questions  even  at 
the  risk  of  a  hubbub.    That  is  how  the  church 
works.    Let  us  be  satisfied  with  our  own  des- 
perate lot,  if  need  be,  but  how  about  being  sat- 
isfied with  the  desperate  lot  of  our  fellows? 

148 


SOCIAL  IMAGINATION 

This  path  of  imaginative  effort  is  painful. 
Let  us  try  another.    How  are  we  who  sit  now 
in  comfortable  places  to  understand  the  man 
who  works  with  his  hands  for  a  daily  wage? 
One  of  us — very  comfortable — declares  that  he 
does  not  need  imagination  for  such  a  task; 
he  knows  from  memory.    He  was  reared  on  a 
farm  and  worked  from  daylight  to  dark  and 
after.    He  feels  that  it  was  good  for  him.  Just 
what   connection    there   is  between   open-air 
farm  work  and  work  before  a  blast  furnace  or 
in  a  coal-mine  is  left  not  indicated.     Or  an- 
other says  that  he  himself  worked  in  these 
exact  conditions  and  rose  above  them,  as  all 
should  rise.    He  does  not  mean  just  this,  for 
not  all  can  rise  to  promotion.     Neither  of 
these  answers  meets  the  question — the  need  of 
trying  to  realize  the  work  of  the  daily  toiler 
as  it  actually  appears  to  that  toiler.    One  man 
is  looking  back  at  his  past  from  a  smug  library 
chair,  with  the  harsher  lines  of  the  tasks  faded 
out.    The  other  man  forgets  that  he  who  rises 
out  of  a  day  laborer's  task  and  then  says  that 
such  work  is  not  bad  for  the  laborer  in  the  con- 
ditions of  the  heavier  industries  has  lost  his 
social  imagination.    That  is  why  it  quite  often 
happens  that  the  rich  man's  son — if  he  be  a  de- 
cent human  being  to  start  with — is  more  open 
to  appeals  to  the  social  imagination  than  the 

149 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

rich  father  who  has  fought  his  way  up.  Fight- 
ing the  way  up  in  a  social  competitive  system 
is  not  a  potent  nourisher  of  unselfish  imagina- 
tion. 

Some  years  ago  there  was  a  mine  explosion 
at  the  Cherry  Mine  in  Illinois  and  a  half-dozen 
or  more  miners  were  imprisoned  for  over  a 
week.  A  strong-willed  leader  kept  his  com- 
panions alive  by  the  sheer  force  of  his  own 
moral  energy  until  help  came.  I  talked  with 
that  leader  shortly  after  he  had  come  out  from 
the  horrible  experience.  I  asked  him  about 
his  plans  for  the  future.  He  told  me  that  as 
soon  as  his  strength  returned  he  was  going 
back  to  the  mine.  On  my  expressing  surprise 
he  quietly  remarked,  "Somebody  has  to  do  it." 
All  his  talk  was  that  of  a  faithful  servant  of 
Ws  fellow  men.  Now,  let  us  set  ourselves  the 
task  of  trying  by  imagination  to  see  what  life 
would  look  like  after  such  an  experience  as 
that  of  my  coal-mining  friend,  and  then  ask 
ourselves  if  we  would  be  willing  after  such  an 
eight-days'  entombment  to  go  back,  just  be- 
cause the  hearths  of  men  had  to  be  warmed  and 
the  wheels  of  their  engines  kept  turning.  Yet 
we  must  try  to  exercise  just  that  type  of 
imagination  if  we  are  to  put  the  Christian  law 
of  good  will  into  effect. 

We  are  striving  hard  to-day  to  contrive  some 

150 


SOCIAL  IMAGINATION 

international  arrangement  that  will  do  away 
with  war.  No  arrangement  will  do  good  for 
long  that  does  not  rest  down  upon  the  cultiva- 
tion of  the  social  imagination.  The  simple 
question  repeatedly  and  incessantly  asked  at 
every  international  crisis,  "How  does  this  look 
to  the  other  side?"  will  do  more  to  stop  war — 
if  the  question  is  asked  with  any  approach  to 
good  faith  and  good  will — than  the  weightiest 
deliberations  of  the  statesmen  if  that  question 
is  left  out.  Consider  even  that  putting  of  the 
case  for  war  which  seems  so  fatalistic,  the  claim 
that  the  absolutely  necessary  raw  materials  of 
the  world  are  not  enough  for  all  the  nations  and 
that  there  is  no  resource  left  but  to  fight  to 
see  who  shall  have  them.  Granted,  for  the  sake 
of  the  argument,  that  there  are  not  enough 
raw  materials  for  the  factories  of  all  the  na- 
tions. Does  it  follow  that  the  nations  must 
fight?  Not  if  there  is  any  degree  of  social 
imagination.  For  with  a  little  exercise  of  that 
gift  which  makes  the  cost  of  war  vivid  before 
the  war  breaks  out,  and  which  enables  us  to 
see  somewhat  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  na- 
tion on  the  other  side  of  the  table,  it  would 
appear  better  all  around  to  come  to  some 
agreed-upon  division  of  raw  materials  than  to 
fight.  Or  take  that  doctrine  of  manifest  des- 
tiny which  is  sometimes  used  by  oratorical 

151 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

patriots  to  foster  war,  as  in  John  Fiske's  story 
of  the  flaming  orator  who  bounded  the  United 
States  on  the  north  by  the  Aurora  Borealis, 
the  east  by  the  rising  sun,  and  the  west  by  the 
Day  of  Judgment.  We  do  not  hear  it  put  just 
so  nowadays,  but  the  rhetoric  is  the  outcome 
of  a  spirit  that  makes  manifest  destiny  the 
property  of  some  one  nation.  All  these  pan- 
national  doctrines  of  ten  years  ago  came  out 
of  such  spirit.  All  were  alike  absurd.  Let 
one  nation  conquer  all  the  others.  The  mani- 
fest destiny  of  that  nation  will  be  plainly  only 
a  material  destiny.  Elementary  imagination 
will  show  that  there  is  no  forcing  of  one  na- 
tion's culture  on  another  without  that  other 
nation's  free  acquiescence.  So  that  we  have 
to  replace  manifest  destiny  by  manifest  des- 
tinies, each  nation  appreciating  and  respecting 
the  traditions  and  point  of  view  and  achieve- 
ments of  the  others. 

There  is  one  realm  in  which  the  church  is 
making  splendid  appeal  to  the  social  imagina- 
tion of  the  world,  namely,  the  missionary 
field.  The  old,  old  twaddle  against  Christian 
missionaries  which  we  used  to  hear  forty  years 
ago  is  dead  and  gone,  except  with  hopelessly 
belated  and  handicapped  intellects.  For  the 
Christian  Church  has  not  only  captured  the 
imagination  of  Christendom  with  the  show- 

152 


SOCIAL  IMAGINATION 

ing  of  the  needs  of  the  non-Christian  na- 
tions, but  is  making  evident  with  increas- 
ing vigor  the  human  possibilities  of  these 
peoples.  The  revelation  of  the  human  pos- 
sibilities in  China  and  India  and  Africa 
by  Christian  missionaries  is  the  outstand- 
ing Christian  achievement  of  our  time.  If 
the  church  can  still  keep  herself  enough  at 
the  angle  of  view  of  the  non-Christian  peoples 
themselves  and  can  respect  and  enforce  their 
demand  for  freedom  from  exploitation  by 
Western  industrialism,  and  from  well-meant 
efforts  of  Christian  leaders  to  patronize  them 
into  a  loss  of  self-direction,  the  Christian 
Church  will  have  made  the  greatest  contribu- 
tion to  the  progress  of  the  religion  of  Jesus 
since  the  days  of  Saint  Paul.  For  Christian- 
ity will  only  begin  to  show  its  possibilities 
when  the  vast  multitudes  seriously  embrace  it. 
There  is  another  sphere  for  the  exercise  of 
the  social  imagination  which  belongs  pecu- 
liarly to  the  church.  If  the  church  appraises 
at  anywhere  near  full  value  her  doctrine  of  im- 
mortality, she  may  draw  somewhat  on  the  im- 
plications of  that  doctrine,  one  of  the  implica- 
tions being  that  the  lives  passed  from  earth 
are  a  host  not  dead  at  all,  but  living  beings 
whose  opinion  is  the  important  public  opinion. 
The  final  public  opinion,  according  to  such  an 

153 


THE  PKEACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

implication,  would  be  the  public  opinion  of 
the  skies.  For  the  sake  of  those  who  accept  in 
some  form  or  other  the  doctrine  of  immortality 
but  who  feel  that  such  a  consideration  as  the 
above  is  altogether  too  ghostly,  we  proceed  to 
say  that  on  any  theory  the  church  must  keep  in 
mind  the  peoples  who  have  lived  and  passed 
on,  by  recognizing  the  sacredness  of  their  labor 
and  by  trying  to  conserve  the  worthy  ideals  for 
which  they  wrought.  The  poet,  looking  out 
over  a  lordly  landscape  of  farm  and  meadow 
and  village,  may  think  of  these  as  coming  from 
the  hand  of  the  Divine  Creator,  but  he  must  be 
careful  not  to  forget  that  these  came  also  from 
the  hands  of  human  creators.  The  sobering  re- 
flection in  any  serious  mind  looking  on  culti- 
vated fields  in  an  old  established  country  is 
that  even  the  soil  of  the  country  has  been  al- 
most literally  made  and  remade  by  generations 
of  toilers.  The  soil  itself  is  the  concentrated 
product  of  human  energies.  Likewise  with  all 
institutions  upon  which  the  hand  of  man  has 
wrought.  There  is  a  sacredness  about  them 
which  becomes  evident  the  instant  we  let  our 
imaginations  call  up  the  innumerable  armies 
of  past  workers.  We  remember  that  we  are 
among  the  posterity  for  which  they  wrought. 
Another  appeal  to  the  Christian  imagination 
starts  from  regard  for  those  to  come  after  ua 

154 


SOCIAL  IMAGINATION 

If  we  are  to  be  guided  by  public  opinion,  let 
us  remember  that  tlie  generations  yet  unborn 
are  to  have  opinions,  probably  opinions  more 
completely  realized  than  ours  can  hope  to  be. 
It  is  a  thoroughly  Christian  motive  to  seek  to 
make  our  acts  such  that  in  the  light  of  that 
later  day  the  moral  direction  in  which  we  are 
tending  shall  be  clear  without  an  interpreter. 

The  earlier  Christian  leaders  used  to  urge 
Christians  to  look  at  life  under  the  form  of 
eternity.  In  this  our  day  of  stupendous 
change  we  would  well  heed  the  old  counsel. 
That  is  to  say,  we  should  seek  to  hold  fast  the 
attitudes  and  the  tendencies  and  the  tempers 
which  perennially  move  in  the  direction  of  the 
loftiest  human  ideal.  Conservative  and  radi- 
cal alike  should  keep  these  human  values  at 
the  center.  The  duty  is  a  legitimate  implica- 
tion and  conclusion  from  our  doctrine  that  we 
worship  a  Christlike  God.  If  we  are  to  attain 
to  the  supreme  blessedness  of  eternal  compan- 
ionship with  such  a  God,  these  human  values 
must  be  conceived  of  as  among  the  moral  ideals 
of  God's  own  life. 


155 


XV 


THE   SOCIAL   SPIRIT  AND  PERSONAL 
PIETY 

We  come  at  last  to  the  bearing  of  the  inter- 
est in  the  wider  social  values  on  individual  per- 
sonal piety.  It  will  possibly  be  remembered 
that  I  have  all  along  said  that  the  only  realities 
in  society  are  the  persons  who  make  up  society. 
Anyone  who  wishes  the  salvation  of  society 
must  earnestly  desire  the  salvation  of  indi- 
viduals, for  a  saved  society  is  a  society  of  in- 
dividuals saved  in  their  social  relationships. 
At  the  center  of  the  moral  life  stands  the  will 
to  do  right  toward  God  and  man.  Jesus  so 
knit  the  command  to  love  God  and  the  com- 
mand to  love  man  together  that  there  is  no 
separating  them  without  death  to  the  religious 
life.  So  that  any  sincere  social  worker  is 
earnestly  desirous  of  seeing  as  many  men  con- 
verted as  possible,  for  conversion  means  the 
acceptance  of  the  law  of  good  will  and  loving 
service  to  man  and  God.  We  must  be  on  our 
guard  here.  The  instant  we  use  a  term  like 
"conversion''  good  people  of  varying  beliefs 
and  tests  swarm  upon  us  to  tell  us  the  signs 

156 


SOCIAL  SPIRIT  AND  PERSONAL  PIETY 

and  marks  of  conversion.  We  are  not  thinking 
now  of  any  labels  or  standards  except  one — 
the  converted  man  is  one  who  has  the  spirit  of 
Christ  and  who  reveals  that  spirit  in  love  to 
his  fellow  man. 

This  service  is  likely  to  lose  its  zest  if  the 
inner  spirit  of  good  will  does  not  deepen  as  the 
years  go  by.  So  that  a  socially  minded  Chris- 
tian must  strive  for  inner  seizure  of  and  by 
the  Christ-spirit.  We  have  spoken  of  the  need 
of  expansion  which  carries  the  Christ-spirit 
into  more  and  more  of  our  acts  and  to  more  and 
more  men  until  the  whole  trend  of  public 
opinion  is  made  Christian.  If  the  stream  is  to 
spread  out  over  such  spaces,  the  force  at  the 
central  spring  must  increase  continuously.  To 
give  the  gospel  this  wider  expansive  spread  the 
inner  pressure  must  immensely  intensify,  for 
wider  expansion  necessarily  requires  deeper 
Intensity.  So  that  the  servant  of  the  church 
— preacher  or  layman — who  in  these  days  tries 
to  make  Christianity  a  world-force  must  seek 
to  make  his  inner  life  increase  in  intensity  at 
the  same  time  that  the  outer  reach  widens. 
If  we  could  use  the  term  "entire  sanctiflcation" 
without  arousing  the  condemnation  of  those 
who  have  been  harassed  beyond  endurance  by 
the  professions  of  personal  spiritual  attain- 
ment not  borne  out  by  visible  fruit,  we  would 

157 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

have  exactly  the  term  we  need ;  but  let  us  use 
the  term  "entire  Christianization."  We  mean 
such  consecrated  practice  in  doing  the  will  of 
God  that  the  nature  of  the  doer  becomes  trans- 
formed. In  the  language  of  the  fashionable 
psychology,  the  subconscious  self  would  be  so 
transformed  that  even  the  impulses  would  of 
themselves  move  in  the  direction  of  social  help- 
fulness. We  would  be  delivered  from  that 
practice  of  repressive  self-discipline  which 
makes  the  subconsciousness  a  dark  cellar  out  of 
which  all  manner  of  wild  impulses  are  trying 
to  burst,  and  would  have  instead  a  practice 
of  control  leading  out  of  the  inner  recesses  in- 
tense spiritual  forces  "domesticated"  into  the 
system  of  actualities  around  us.  A  domesti- 
cated or  controlled  impulse  is  stronger  than 
a  wild  impulse,  just  as  a  domesticated  animal 
is  usually  stronger  than  a  wild  beast.  In  short, 
salvation  for  the  individual  must  work  into 
the  whole  personal  nature  if  that  individual 
is  to  help  much  to  save  the  whole  world. 

The  churchman  in  alarm  over  what  might 
happen  to  theology  if  this  attempt  to  save  the 
whole  world  were  to  become  widespread  may 
reassure  himself  with  the  reflection  that  when 
the  Christian  purpose  is  set  toward  the  larger 
human  results  the  theology  becomes  more  hu- 
man to  correspond.    The  hampering  weight  on 

158 


SOCIAL  SPIKIT  AND  PERSONAL  PIETY 

theology  as  such  is  its  proneness  to  get  away 
from  the  human.  There  are  those  who  tell  us 
that  theology  is  among  the  studies  to  be  pur- 
sued on  their  own  account  without  regard  to 
any  practical  consequences,  like  some  forms  of 
art  or  of  mathematics.  If  God  is  like  unto 
Christ,  let  us  ask  ourselves  how  much  such  a 
God  would  appreciate  being  contemplated  like 
a  work  of  art  or  of  abstruse  mathematics  while 
his  children  were  dying  of  starvation  or  war 
or  preventable  disease.  Those  who  tell  us  that 
there  are  branches  of  knowledge  to  be  followed 
only  for  the  sake  of  knowledge  itself  do  not 
mean  just  what  they  say,  for  knowledge  is 
knowledge  by  a  human  being,  and  the  knowl- 
edge must  somehow  minister  to  that  human 
being.  The  ministry  may  indeed  be  of  high 
quality — above  any  utilitarian  purpose — but 
no  matter  how  high  the  quality  the  ministry 
must  have  some  relation  to  a  human  interest. 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  in  the  ^'Wrong  Box" 
has  carried  out  to  ridiculous  lengths  the  con- 
versation of  an  old  social  investigator  who  had 
studied  out  with  amazing  ingenuity  a  set  of 
social  statistics  of  no  interest  to  anyone.  Much 
theological  speculation  has  been  likewise  bar- 
ren. It  has  required  enormous  mental  energy, 
but  has  been  devoid  of  anything  that  would 
arouse  the  interest  of  a  fairly  normal  human 
159 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

being.  Much  of  this  theology  came  out  of  a 
period  when  the  church  had  turned  away  from 
the  living  interests  of  living  men.  Now,  what- 
ever else  the  social  spirit  may  or  may  not  do,  it 
will  at  least  keep  theology  human.  We  are 
mistaken  if  we  assume  that  the  social  passion 
has  to  do  only  with  the  more  material  needs. 
Any  man  who  works  for  his  fellow  men  is 
anxious  that  they  get  their  chance  in  the  un- 
folding of  their  every  capability.  It  is  a  posi- 
tive grief  to  anyone  who  knows  day  laborers, 
for  example,  to  think  how  wasteful  of  scien- 
tific, philosophic,  artistic  possibilities  is  the 
system  of  society  under  which  we  live. 

The  believer  with  a  social  passion  keeps  close 
to  the  central  positions  in  theology.  The  strug- 
gle to  better  evil  conditions  makes  him  think 
of  God  in  terms  of  relief  to  men.  He  has  no 
time  for  overrefinement  of  theological  defini- 
tion. If  he  can  keep  before  himself  God  as  the 
Friend  and  Helper  of  men,  he  is  content. 
Healthy  progress  in  theology  is  quite  likely  to 
come  out  of  thus  thinking  of  God  in  terms  of 
Christ.  To  be  sure,  the  formal  theologian  in 
his  study  says  that  he  too  is  thinking  of  God 
in  human  terms,  that  he  is  trying  to  give  men 
a  conception  of  God  that  will  make  God  satisfy 
all  parts  of  redeemed  human  nature.  All  of 
which  is  true  with  thinker  after  thinker.    We 

160 


SOCIAL  SPIRIT  AND  PERSONAL  PIETY 

are  not  quite  so  blind  to  the  service  of  the- 
ologians as  to  say  that  only  the  man  at  work 
in  a  slum  district  or  with  a  group  of  labor 
leaders  or  in  a  hall  of  legislature  is  serving  his 
fellow  man.  We  have  the  highest  esteem  for 
the  theologians,  but  we  insist  that  the  funda- 
mental data  on  which  they  study  should  come 
out  of  the  struggles  of  those  who  are  in  prac- 
tical effort  expressing  their  belief  in  the  Christ- 
like God.  Otherwise  the  theological  mind  is 
likely  to  run  off  into  the  empty  speculations 
which  have  only  an  abstractly  intellectual 
foundation.  Without  attempting  to  trespass 
upon  the  theologian's  prerogative  may  we  say 
that  if  we  are  to  hold  fast  to  the  God  of  the 
New  Testament  the  moral  rather  than  the 
metaphysical  attributes  must  be  uppermost  in 
God.  Better,  in  a  word,  sacrifice  some  of  God's 
power  than  to  sacrifice  any  of  his  moral  full- 
ness. There  are  those  who  will  have  it  that 
God's  omnipotence  must  be  maintained  even 
in  face  of  the  demands  of  the  human  will  for 
freedom.  If  we  have  to  sacrifice  one  or  the 
other,  better  let  the  divine  omnipotence  go. 
This  is  a  suggestion  of  what  we  mean  when  we 
speak  of  the  passion  for  men  as  keeping  the 
human  values  in  the  first  place.  The  man 
hard  at  work  to  lift  men  up  into  the  true  free- 
dom is  not  likely  to  concern  himself  overmuch 

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THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

to  preserve  the  metaphysical  omnipotence  of 
God.  He  would  sooner  have  an  all-righteous 
and  all-loving  Father  as  revealed  in  Christ 
than  an  omnipotent  Sovereign.  If  God  is  to 
create  men  at  all,  he  must  be  willing  to  make 
some  sacrifices  in  himself,  no  matter  how  far 
they  reach.  In  the  doctrine  of  the  Christlike 
God  sacrifice  is  the  first  and  the  last  word  for 
God  himself. 

Speaking  of  sacrifice  leads  naturally  to  the 
next  remark,  namely,  that  the  experience  of 
social  effort  is  one  of  cross-bearing,  and  the 
cross-bearing  in  every  human  aspect  is  like  the 
cross-bearing  of  the  Christ.  Think  of  this  par- 
allelism for  a  moment.  To  begin  with,  the  suf- 
fering of  Christ  was  that  involved  in  putting 
up  with  the  imperfections  and  inadequacies  of 
those  for  whom  he  was  working.  What  often 
wears  out  the  social  enthusiasm  of  the  social 
fighter  who  does  not  base  his  battle  on  the 
Christ- view  is  just  the  sheer  abundance  of  hu- 
man imperfection.  The  worker  meets  so  much 
of  unresponsiveness,  so  much  of  mixed  motive, 
so  much  willingness  to  make  moral  compro- 
mise, so  much  of  ingratitude  and  positive  be- 
trayal— in  fine,  so  much  of  general  "seami- 
ness"  in  the  life  with  which  he  works  that  after 
a  while  his  enthusiasm  dies  down.  Jesus 
prayed:  "Forgive  them,   for  they  know  not 

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SOCIAL  SPIRIT  AND   PERSONAL  PIETY 

what  they  do."  This  was  divine  charity  in- 
deed, but  human  ignorance  itself  was  likely 
one  of  the  most  humiliating  and  distressing 
features  of  life  as  Jesus  saw  it. 

Another  feature  of  cross-bearing  like  that  of 
Jesus  is  the  type  of  persecution  the  social 
fighter  meets.  A  socially  minded  Christian, 
like  his  Master,  seldom  gets  a  chance  to  fight 
out  his  battles  on  the  main  issues.  The  charge 
of  blasphemy  brought  against  Jesus  had  no 
shade  of  relation  to  the  main  reasons  for  which 
the  chief  priests  brought  Jesus  to  death.  The 
priests  were  not  so  sensitive  to  blasphemy  as 
to  desire  the  death  of  Jesus  on  that  account 
alone.  Jesus  had  forced  an  issue  that  im- 
periled the  places  and  powers  of  the  priests; 
but  the  issue  was  never  joined  on  that  plane. 
Jesus  said  to  his  disciples,  "Blessed  are  ye 
when  men  revile  you."  Eeviling  is  the  favor- 
ite method  of  attack  on  a  social  prophet  who 
gets  close  enough  to  a  wrong  against  the  people 
to  make  the  perpetrators  of  the  wrong  wince. 
Almost  never  is  such  an  issue  met  in  terms  of 
the  issue  itself.  Let  a  political  idealist  arise 
to  lead  his  party  along  lofty  moral  paths. 
The  battle  seldom  wages  around  the  idealistic 
measures  themselves.  It  takes  the  form  of  re- 
vilings  against  the  leader.  I  do  not  now  recall 
a  leader  in  American  political  reform  free  from 

163 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

attack  by  Ms  enemies  for  drunkenness  or  li- 
centiousness or  lack  of  personal  integrity.  The 
plight  of  the  more  distinctively  social  prophet 
is  even  worse.  The  Jews  called  Jesus  a  blas- 
phemer because  that  was  the  worst  thing  they 
could  say  about  him.  If  any  man  leads  in  over- 
throwing an  evil  like  the  liquor  traffic  or  an 
industrial  cruelty,  or  pleads  for  a  better  chance 
for  men,  women  and  children  where  money  in- 
terests are  against  such  chance,  he  might  just 
as  well  make  up  his  mind  that  whatever  is  the 
w^orst  that  his  enemies  can  say  of  him,  that  they 
will  say.  After  all  allowance  for  the  foolish 
martyrs  who  by  sheer  excess  of  folly  bring  an 
unnecessary  martyrdom  on  themselves  it  must 
not  be  forgotten  that  the  wisest,  most  tactful 
defender  of  human  rights  will  have  to  take  his 
share  of  cross-bearing. 

Again,  the  suffering  of  the  social  benefactor, 
like  that  of  his  Lord,  is  vicarious.  On  the  hu- 
man side  he  is  bearing  in  himself  the  sins  of 
mankind,  the  sins  of  a  social  system  for  which 
he  is  not  responsible ;  and  the  suffering  which 
he  undergoes  is  to  free  others  from  suffering. 
Merely  personal  distresses  are  not  necessarily 
the  Christian  bearing  of  the  cross,  for  such 
cross-bearing  looks  toward  lightening  the  woes 
of  others.  Nor  is  there  any  virtue  in  suffering 
for  suffering's  own  sake.    Cross-bearing,  to  be 

164 


SOCIAL  SPIRIT  AND  PERSONAL  PIETY 

Christly  cross-bearing,  must  have  this  large 
social  rjeference  and  implication.  Moreover, 
the  social  spirit  has  an  effect  on  the  prayer 
life  of  the  Christian  who  has  come  to  the  social 
point  of  view,  an  effect  both  on  the  quantity 
and  quality  of  prayer,  if  such  terms  are  here 
permissible.  For  the  social  worker  knows 
that  the  divine  force  which  redeems  society 
can  only  arrive  through  human  agencies.  So- 
cial results  are  wrought  by  men  upon  men. 
If  man's  inhumanity  to  man  has  made  count- 
less thousands  mourn,  redemption  can  come 
only  through  man's  humanity  to  man.  The 
Christian  worker  prays  to  get  into  communion 
with  God,  that  from  that  communion  there 
may  be  released  in  himself  those  human  forces 
which  will  heal  and  soothe.  This  means  the 
incessant  cultivation,  not  necessarily  of  pe- 
tition, but  of  the  prayer  attitude  and  the 
prayer  spirit.  The  social  prayer  must  literally 
be  without  ceasing.  Moreover,  the  prayer 
takes  on  that  finest  form  which  we  call  inter- 
cessory. It  is  not  for  the  one  praying  himself. 
It  is  for  others,  and  that  "for  others"  is  the 
sign  of  distinctively  Christian  prayer. 

We  have  said  repeatedly  that  every  system 
must  finally  be  judged  by  its  results  upon  him 
who  practices  the  system.  We  are  willing  to 
have  a  social  Christianity  judged  by  its  re- 

165 


THE  PREACHER  AND  THE  PEOPLE 

suits  on  those  who  practice  it.  We  believe  that 
the  practice  of  the  search  for  the  larger  and 
finer  human  values  in  social  expressions  of 
Christianity  will  make  saints  of  the  seekers. 
The  main  goal  is  the  help  of  those  whose  lot 
is  hard,  but  from  this  help  results  also  the 
sanctification  of  the  helpers.  Again,  as  soon 
as  a  man's  lot  is  improved  by  the  rescue  and 
uplift  which  come  through  Christianity  it  is 
the  duty  of  that  man  to  seek  to  help  others. 
Thus  the  number  of  saints  grows.  The  truly 
elect  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  are  those  labor- 
ing for  the  election  of  their  fellows.  The  idea 
of  election  and  salvation  must  be  constantly 
expanded.  From  those  wider  expansions  new 
streams  must  flow  back  upon  the  lives  of  the 
individuals  in  society.  The  social  movement 
starts  from  an  expansive  force  in  the  life  of 
individuals.  It  must  return  upon  individuals 
to  deepen  the  intensities  at  the  personal  cen- 
ters, for  when  the  last  word  is  said,  it  is  at 
those  personal  centers  that  the  spirit  of  reli- 
gion abides. 


166 


Date  Due 

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